5 Things to Think About When Considering User Activation

You will often read in articles about “activation” and getting your user activated with your product. It is the third “A” in Pirate Metrics and relates to when you consider your users “active” especially around the ever-so-important Weekly and Monthly Active Users metric. There are insights you can garner from your data about activation, but one of the most important things to note is that how you read and understand your data is based on how you have implemented your data infrastructure and what your approach to data governance is. That is to say, we construct the words we use to understand our users, so it is important that we are as rigorous in our approach to data governance as we are in the technical requirements we write when building our products.

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1. Define what activation means first

Activation can mean a lot of different things depending on the product. For example, if you are a CRM then you might consider activation to be when a user uploads contacts. If you are a focused on subscription, they you would consider a sign up or a free trial as an activation. Whatever you decide, your activation should be tied to something that can be linked not only to business outcomes like revenue but also other metrics like engagement and retention. Activation should be widely understood and agreed upon…