Understanding what is the main reason why users engage is not an easy easy task
Here you can find a complete Playbook about activation with many examples.
How to define Activation
Activation is the moment when a user finds something valuable in your product that will make him/her come back again.
There is no universal way to measure activation. Even within your product activation could mean different things.
This is because you might have very different use cases in your product and therefore many different personas.
Salespeople might activate on a certain feature, after following a certain path. Product managers are likely to find interesting other types of features.
Make sure to understand correctly all the main activation milestones and journeys
Why Activation
The average app loses its entire user base within a few months, which is why only a few thousand apps keep getting used overtime over the millions of apps in the App stores.
This is because most of the times users give you only one chance to show them some value.
Most of the times, the users that keep coming back share a revelation moment.
By digging into your users’ behavior you can reverse engineer the product milestone they have to hit to finally "Get it".
Getting users to that "A-ha" moment as quickly as possible and helping build habits will become the main goal of all your user activation efforts
How to use the Activation Template
The goal of this report is to help you find which events activate your users and how many times they should be triggered to make sure users stick to your product!
Here's how to use it
First, you'll have to pick your sign-up event
Then pick a couple of events that in your opinion could drive activation for a certain type of user
Try different sets of events by editing your report setup. Find the highest activation percentage
Compare retention and find your occurrence target: how many times are the best-retaining users performing your activation events?