What is the best moment to target users during the onboarding process?
Before we can answer this question, we need to be able to answer the following first: How long does it take to onboard new users?
In other words, how long does it take for users to get from the moment they create an account, to the moment they receive the value of your app (the moment when they are onboarded)?
How do we analyse the data in this report?
This is a cohort-based report. This means that when you select a specific period, we will automatically collect all of the accounts created during that period, but we report the onboarding status of these accounts regardless of when that happened (even if it is outside of the selected period). We recommend selecting longer periods of time (two months, if available) in order to obtain a statistically relevant answer.
If the algorithm behind this report does not identify a predictable behaviour for the time it takes to onboard, then you will see a standard distribution range, like this:
Usually, this happens when the selected period is too short, or there is not enough data to analyse.
In case we can detect a predictable behaviour, then you’ll see a histogram like the one below:
As you can see, most accounts finished the onboarding process in a short amount of time, but then there is a long tail of accounts that took much longer to finish the onboarding process, or to get to the first value. We can say that the first group of accounts have common or typical behaviour. We can identify the maximum time needed to onboard (which in the above example is 40 minutes, which gives us an average of 13 minutes).
Accounts from the long tail are accounts that have unpredictable behaviour. Note: The amount of time we report also takes into consideration the intervals during which the user was away from the app. These are the accounts that might need help from your side in order to finish the onboarding. They might reach to you if they find a fast way, but you should not wait for this to happen. You can act proactively and target them with in-app messages, or emails in order to help them finish the onboarding process.