🪴 Pranav Mandhare

Fundamentals of Website Growth

5 min read

So the basic meaning of achieving growth in context of websites is to,

  1. Increase Visitors (volume)
  2. Increase User Engagement (conversions - depends on what the goal of website is)
  3. Or of-course improve both aspects

The core value within any Growth role lies within the ability of the team to achieve it predictably. For instance any empty patch of land could grow grass, but that grass was neither desired nor predicted.

So any Growth System should be able to,

  1. Grow for the desired metrics
  2. Pause and Resume growth at will by understanding what drives the growth in each market
  3. Impact be predictable quantitatively in future

Core resistances to Growth:

  1. Undesired or unanticipated Friction that disrupt the designed flow
  2. Churn which comes from attention span or incorrect targeting

Hence some of the must have skills for growth positions should be:

  1. Very good at identifying and understanding the users
  2. Good at targeting the users with desired benefits
  3. Ability to judge where friction could arise

How to understand the users? There are three core ways,

  1. Watch them
  2. Play with them
  3. Talk to them

Watching them means using tools like Hotjar where you can plot user activities over your website using a heatmap. Plus tools like Mixpanel, Google Analytics gives direct and indirect metrics like active sessions, event counts, time spent, stickiness, DAU - MAU trends, etc.

Playing with the users means manipulating levers of the website to see and justify the impact. The levers are usually:

  1. Around Positioning of CTAs
  2. Screens, steps, and decision making encountered within flows
  3. Text and Visual Assets that communicate to the user

A few examples are:

  1. Sharing the most beneficial content to the user up-front when the first screen is loaded
  2. Simplifying the time taken and number of decisions made over secondary flows like authentication, payment collection. For instance one step OAuth.
  3. Placing CTAs consistently where users are used to seeing them - like in the bottom right of the webpage. Making them sticky - adding good context to CTA. Keeping them simple.

Talking to them means to pick a user from each cohort and set up an interview with them to collect behavioural insights. Ask questions to them that reveal their process - we are not there to collect their opinion but to understand their behaviour.

To ensure a system grows long-term. Retention becomes a very important aspect to master. Retention means users stick with your solutions long term. For that to happen,

  1. The solution should be honest and quality
  2. The users should be engaged regularly, study of D-7, D-30 retentions and so on.
  3. The monetization including pricing strategy per market and user cohorts should be desirable

Some other insights:

  1. Acquisition and Activation shall occur at the same instance or same session: Acquisition is getting the user onto the website and activation is triggering an aha moment that keeps them on the website. Acquisition with weak activation gives high bounce rates which can be measured on analytics tools.
  2. Acquisition happens earlier than the user lands on the website: It usually happens to advertisements, branding, word of mouth, referrals and many other means.
  3. Acquisition has high costs over Activation, Conversion, and Retention. Its analysed through a metric called CAC. Hence the strategy should always be to first fix the later three metrics and lastly solve the Acquisition.

Summary

Acquisition

  • happens outside of website - branding, ads, referrals, wom, seo etc
  • high cost CAC
  • active session, sources of traffic utm coding, CTR or CAC, referrals

Activation

  • should occur in the same session or earliest with acquisition
  • its aha moment
  • focus on benefits to the user
  • low bounce rate, study time spent, pages per session, key events triggered count, activation rate

Conversion

  • positioning
  • content and assets
  • flows
  • simple authentication, onboarding, payment completion
  • low friction, low churn
  • dropoffs on every decision made, time spent in secondary requirements

Retention

  • ensures long term growth
  • improving revenues
  • study D1, D7, D30, stickiness, ARPU, LTV, renewal rate

What would I do in the first month

  1. Conversion: Standardise and simplify flows, remove avoidable decision making for the users - simplify decision making through better UI/UX
  2. Conversion: Eliminate friction that is leading to churn - includes bugs, loading times, waiting times, incorrect information or direction, too low or too much information, positioning of CTAs
  3. Activation: Improve communication - notification delivery, resume where you left
  4. Activation: Study behaviour through analytics - deliver high quality benefits
  5. Retention: pricing strategy, pricing methods, renewals
  6. Acquisition: ways to improve cac, study channel - optimize marketing mix, referrals, word of mouth

Stories from Career

  • Payment Journeys, flexibility with payment methods, instant delivery where we improved revenues by 6X
  • Micropackages strategy focused on free user acquisition and activation
  • Search focused on activation
  • Smart Batching focused on conversions
  • Referrals focused on activation
  • Renewals dashboards that helped improve retention
  • Cross Sells/Up Sells helped improve revenue conversions

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