Beyond Firebase: How A1Apps scaled its business with AppMetrica
Embarking on a journey of evolution, A1Apps, an app developer with a portfolio of 20+ applications, shifted its monetization strategy from in-app ads to subscription-based monetization.
Find out how A1Apps approached the changes and why they chose AppMetrica as its primary mobile marketing and product analytics partner.
A1Apps is a mobile app marketing and development studio with productivity, media, gaming, and entertainment tools & apps like Document reader and editor, Chromecast, Email App, WhatsApp message recovery, QR Scanner, PDF/Document Scanner, video downloader, Chat AI, Car race game, and more.
More about A1Apps
20+ apps
DAOs: 1.5-2 million
Genre: productivity and office
Monetization: primarily subscription-driven
OS: iOS and Android
Geography: worldwide, majority in Asia. China is a new market
The Challenge
As an up-and-coming app developer, A1Apps relied on Google’s free Firebase analytics solution to measure its user acquisition and app performance. But as the company’s app portfolio grew and monetization strategies evolved, A1Apps saw the need to adapt its internal workflows to align with the new vision in several vectors.
First, A1Apps shifted its app monetization strategy from in-app ads to a subscription-based model, which underlined the need for more sophisticated instruments to analyze its user behavior, improve retention and other performance metrics.
Second, the team accelerated its marketing efforts even more and saw the need for a dedicated solution to track its incoming users, ad revenue and other UA metrics.
Third, the team noticed discrepancies in their analytics reports, which became a growing concern as A1Apps grew in revenue and needed accurate data to rely on. The team lacked one reliable source of truth both for app marketing and performance analytics.
Fourth, the team struggled with Firebase’s complex interface, which affected individual team members’ productivity and efficiency.
We realized that if there are wrong numbers in Google Analytics or Firebase, we wouldn’t be able to optimize any of our campaigns correctly. And that stalls growth in so many ways.
These change not only reshaped A1Apps’s product and overall revenue strategy, but launched an overhaul of their internal processes. Now what the team needed was a solution that aligned with their current needs and growth strategy.
If you want to grow your mobile app, analyze user behavior and acquire top LTV traffic, it’s crucial to rely on accurate data for all your product and marketing decisions.
AppMetrica is an all-in-one mobile app analytics solution that allows you to take your app to the next level at an affordable price.
The Solution
To catch up with its own growth, A1Apps decided they needed one trusted solution for all of the team’s needs:
- Accurate UA reports
- Detailed real-time app performance reports
- A user-friendly interface for the entire team
- Friendly pricing range
AppMetrica met the team’s criteria perfectly. Aside from in-depth reports on user acquisition, cohorts and engagement activity, A1Apps saw great potential in AppMetrica’s Funnel reports, including individual users’ profile views. The solution also comes with A/B testing and flags config features, real-time crash & error reporting and more.
As a small company that seeked a reasonably priced solution, A1Apps felt AppMetrica’s value for the money was unmatched.
How A1Apps uses AppMetrica
The A1Apps team set switching from Google Firebase (its primary analytics tool) as the starting point for streamlining its marketing and growth processes. The team members who were the primary users of the analytics platform felt that AppMetrica’s interface is more user-friendly, so they began to establish their internal workflows around this platform.
Funnels for rolling out new app versions
A1Apps team relies on Funnel reports to evaluate several metrics, including crash rate, ANR rates, open rates and other general metrics to verify a smooth rollout of new app versions.
In addition, observing real-time crash rate statistics has helped the team identify issues that went unnoticed in the testing phase as soon as their users began to install the new app version. Crash statistics in the Funnel reports have helped the team avoid losses and prevent negative reviews in the app stores.
Top-level funnels and metrics like Install to Trial, Install to Purchase, Install to Primary Feature, Install to Secondary feature access allow A1Apps to compare the performance of the new version of the app compared to the new one.
«We have seen situations where the primary metric like Install to Purchases was doubled and there are scenarios where the install to purchase went to zero as well (initial rollout phase) — keeping an eye on version wise data point has helped us avoid rolling out red-flag versions and to speed up the rollout of versions which are actually showing promising results. Following screenshot shows how the funnel looks like for one of the apps. The same funnel can be segmented easily based on version or geography.»
— Ankit Sharma, Co-Founder, A1Apps
Optimizing in-app ad performance
Finally, the team tracks UA-related metrics to evaluate the performance of current in-app ads across the user base.
«We can segment the funnels based on country and see where exactly the fill & show rates are higher and identify the problem areas without having to deal with bad interfaces that some of the mediation platforms provide. Additionally if the fill rate etc is low in certain area we can dig deeper and see what is the cause of the error by enabling tree view in funnels and importing the parameters»
— Ankit Sharma, Co-Founder, A1Apps
Verifying data from other analytics solutions
Though A1Apps hired AppMetrica to verify data on Google Firebase, the team soon realized that AppMetrica’s statistics are more accurate. In order to stay competitive and meet all of the app stores’ requirements, it’s important for the team that the revenues are reflected in the ad networks, the Apple console and analytics tools are the same. Switching to AppMetrica as the primary data consolidator has brought the team closer to this goal.
Seeing individual user journeys to increase retention
Tracking individual user journeys via Profile views has become an indispensable feature for A1Apps. Because the company’s monetization strategy revolves around recruiting pro-level users, the team has to understand those users’ journeys in detail and monitor the apps for any issues like crashes.
«Even though a 0,5% crash rate overall for an app might seem alright, in a scenario where these crashes are focused entirely on the pro audience the pro user crash rate could be as high as 5%. Appmetrica has allowed us to track the journey of such users by evaluating what journey these pro users were taking just before the crash happened.
Having the ability to drill down to the profile level allowed us to see in parameters which sub feature user interacted with before the crash occurred. That’s how we were able to bring down the crash rate for the pro users to within a 1% range, thus increasing the retention»
— Ankit Sharma, Co-Founder, A1Apps
Identifying the best UA channels and keywords
According to the A1Apps team, Appmetrica has been really useful in making things more transparent in an otherwise black box of information. When it comes to user acquisition, the app stores don’t give a lot of detailed information about which ad campaigns were most successful or which keywords brought the most paying users.
AppMetrica has solved that problem for the team, helping them precisely evaluate campaign source and success via the Trial rate per keyword / campaign metric, which identifies the most impactful keywords in a given location.
Moreover, the team uses another service, Adapty, to evaluate the final picture and to see where to optimize the campaigns and where to increase the spending.
Complementing solutions
«For various use cases, we’ve experimented with different platforms. Initially, we adopted Mixpanel; however, due to restrictions with our Android apps, we opted for platforms that offer paywall reporting, such as LY, for specific volume scenarios. LY handles paywall customization and user view tracking seamlessly. Additionally, we introduced Smart Look for video analytics, acknowledging that while it lacks certain features, it provides valuable insights through heat maps. Currently, we are in discussions about integrating Microsoft Clarity, a free solution renowned for its heatmap capabilities. Despite exploring these options, our central data source remains AP, ensuring consistency in our analytics processes.»
— Ankit Sharma, Co-Founder, A1Apps
The results
AppMetrica has solidified its position as A1Apps’ central hub for reliable and accurate data, shaping the foundation of the team’s internal workflows.
Leveraging the platform’s capabilities, the team constructs funnels to identify and address user drop-offs (such as at the time of crashes), thus enhancing user retention.
Additionally, the exploration and tracking of user paths within AppMetrica have become instrumental in refining and optimizing the overall user journey, allowing the team to support its subscription-based monetization strategy and apply individual user journeys in optimizing their app experience.
As A1Apps’ app portfolio and team grows, the company plans to integrate AppMetrica into its marketing workflows and improve its apps based on the solutions in-depth UA and product analytics.
