Dec 14
How analytics supported our decision to build a Mobile app for patients
Product analysts at Docplanner are responsible for guiding product teams in the right direction using data and supporting the company strategy with analytics. In this article I will give some insight into how Analytics contributed to our decision to build a Mobile App for patients, and the impact it has had on user retention and engagement.
An important part of Docplanner is the marketplace where users (patients) can use filters to find a suitable doctor and schedule an appointment online. On the other hand we provide tools to help doctors and clinics manage their patients digitally in the form of a SaaS subscription.
The majority of traffic on our marketplace is organic from search engines, and those users tend to have low brand perception. Most of the time they just followed wherever Google led them after searching “Dentist Barcelona” without being very aware of what service they were dealing with. We noticed this by looking at data and seeing that many users would come to our website, book a visit, and disappear for quite a long time, in other words we had low user retention rates.
User retention is measured as the percentage of users from a cohort that comes back to use the product over time.
Our User Retention cohorts for our website looked something like this:
As a Product Analyst, some things stand out from this table. Firstly the percentages are rather low and decreasing quickly, the 1-month retention rate for the April ’21 cohort is around 18%, 6-month retention already drops to 8%, and 12-month retention is 6%. We know from research that on average our users book around 4 doctor appointments per year, showing that they’ve had plenty of opportunities to come back!
Secondly, the retention rates are not improving over time. The 6-month retention rate for the April ’21 cohort was 8%, and for the April ’22 cohort it was still 8%. If any effort was put into retargeting users by product or marketing teams during this time, it didn’t really pay off.
User retention rates are important for any SaaS or Marketplace business. Low user retention rates, and therefore low Customer Lifetime Value, can make it difficult to keep growing in the long term. Not being able to retain users means you are very dependent on a constant stream of new users acquired through SEO or Paid Advertising to keep growing. It makes you vulnerable to Google SEO updates, market saturation and changing market conditions.
Our bet was that if we could convert users from our website to download our App, it would improve brand perception. Users would know what App they were downloading, and we could introduce them to other features apart from the reservation system. Instead of being “just a random website” where users once found a doctor, we could be the Healthcare App in their pocket, moving from a transactional to a relational experience. After all we have many more features than just online booking, but only a small percentage of visitors are discovering them.
Building a completely new Mobile App is quite similar to building a new product, and needs to be validated with similar frameworks. In our case, there were some hypothesis we wanted to verify to see if it made sense to invest more in our App.
- Can we grow our App sustainably without harming the main business metrics?
- Can we retain users in our App?
- Can we engage users, and make them explore other App features?
Can we grow our App sustainably without harming the main business metrics?
To convert users from our website to the App store to download our app, we added banners on various pages for users browsing on Mobile devices.
The main metrics we were tracking to gauge user interest were Click-Through Rate from seeing the banner to clicking on it, and Conversion Rate from clicking to actually downloading. App downloads took off quickly and we had nice growth the first couple of months.
But on the other hand we also needed to monitor control metrics since we did not want to decrease important company KPIs like Bookings, Bounce Rate and Avg. Session Duration (which can affect SEO positions). As an analyst, I was juggling with various metrics at this point, managing multiple external stakeholders who each cared for a different metric.
We also had to look out for uninstalls to make sure we didn’t lose a large portion of installs right away. Data was fundamental to taking decisions in this step.
Can we retain users in our App?
After the first year, the User Retention cohorts for our App looked like this:
Retention in the app is 2x that of our website!
The 6-month retention rate was 16% vs. 8% for users acquired through our website, a huge improvement! Apart from just the increase, retention rates were also continuously growing over time: 1-month, 6-month and 12-month retention rates all grew during the year. Over time the product team added more features to the app and worked on making it more reliable, and it seems like our efforts are paying off.
Comparing your product to benchmarks is generally a good idea but can also be tricky. An App to book doctors’ appointments will most likely not be used on a weekly or even monthly basis, making it difficult to compare to other apps. Having “good” retention also depends on other factors like Customer Acquisition Costs and where traffic is coming from.
According to Apptentive, 3-month retention for medical apps is around 34% and 12-month retention around 16% (just above our 12%).
Can we engage users, and make them explore other App features?
The average number of bookings per user in the 90-day window since being acquired was almost 30% higher for users acquired in the App vs users acquired in the Web, a significant improvement!
Furthermore the improvement increases over time.
Also, according to our “App engagement” definition (which is a topic for a separate article), a significant percentage of App users can be considered engaged in that they used any of the features that we defined as “valuable”.
We are conscious that survivorship bias might play a role here, given that certain types of users are more likely to download an app and use our service. Nevertheless looking at the improvements in various metrics in both the short-term and long-term we have high confidence from a data perspective that converting users to our App is positive for retention and engagement.
There are other benefits of having an app compared to just a website. For example, one of our main features is SMS reminders before appointments. For App users, we could now send Push notifications which are free whereas SMS cost money. Those cost savings strengthened our argument for the app even more. From the analytics perspective app users are also much more easy to track compared to web users. Around 80% of our app users are logged in, whereas the majority of our web users aren’t. This makes us rely on cookie tracking for web users, whereas we can assign IDs to logged-in App users. It gives us more and accurate data, allowing us to make even better data-informed decisions.
Lastly we can offer personalised experiences in the App. After asking users some simple demographic data like Gender and Age, we can already start recommending relevant doctor visits to our patients! Imagine an app that creates a tailor-made medical plan just for you. This is what we have in mind when we think of a truly “relational experience”.
The result
Our mobile app has grown to become one of the most significant parts of the company, and it keeps growing every month. A significant part of bookings in Docplanner are now scheduled through the app, and it has over 1.5 Million MAU and growing. App users are more engaged, have higher retention, and are generally more happy with our product. Even doctors are now recommending their patients to download our health app.
I hope I gave some valuable insight into how Product Analysts at DocPlanner guide teams to make decisions based on data, and are involved in strategic decision-making. Analysts also work with the tech team to implement tracking, oversee ETL processes and data quality, build automated dashboards and much more. If you have any questions feel free to reach out 🙂
