In-App Events, What Are They and Why They Matter

Read time: 6 minutes

Welcome to our latest edition of the newsletter! Today, we continue with our approach from last week, focusing on real Go-To-Market struggles faced by founders in the market. These struggles are ones we have encountered while working directly with founders or engaging with them through our content on social platforms. One such topic that has been a recurring theme in these discussions is "in-app events." Many founders find it challenging to define in-app events properly, inadvertently missing out on the immense value they can offer.

Throughout this edition, we will delve into the world of in-app events and explore their significance in optimizing your startup's success. We will cover essential aspects such as understanding what in-app events are, why they are crucial for your business, how to define them effectively, and the best practices to leverage them for your benefit.

But before we dive in, let's consider a couple of scenarios:

1. You've identified your distribution channels for marketing campaigns, but despite launching campaigns, you find yourself optimizing solely based on clicks, installs, or top-of-the-funnel actions. Missing the link between your campaign and meaningful in-app events prevents you from understanding whether users will convert at a lower cost per acquisition (CPA). As a result, you may optimize on metrics that don't accurately reflect user quality, or worse, invest heavily in costly CPAs for conversions.

2. Users install or sign up for your product, but you lack insights into their user journey beyond the initial interaction. Questions arise about user retention, value activation through in-app events, and the key features that drive eventual purchases. Unfortunately, without in-app events in place, providing objective answers to these critical questions becomes an impossible challenge.

If any of this sounds familiar, worry not! By the end of this edition, you'll have a clear understanding of the value that in-app events bring to the table, how to implement them effectively, and how to harness their power to optimize your product, marketing, and user/customer journey.

What are “in-app events”?

In-app events are specific interactions or actions that users take within your application. These events act as valuable data points, providing key insights into user engagement, behavior, and overall product experience. Unlike top-of-the-funnel metrics like clicks or installs, in-app events capture user actions that occur within your app after the initial sign-up or installation. This real-time data serves as the backbone of user insights, offering a deep understanding of how users interact with your product.

There are two types of in-app events:

1. Generic in-app events → These are the events that most people know and are aware of; sign-up/registration, open app/start a session, purchase, and in some cases referrals.
   

2. Custom in-app events → These are the events that should give you insight into all the unique values and aspects of your product, they will be an essential part of the “activation metrics” as they will indicate if the users have used these key value features that drive further adoption and usage

In-app events are activated once a user triggers the event, the best practice is to set up the trigger in the backend of the app/product so that only once the action has been confirmed the event is triggered, this is to avoid any false positives that are caused by setting the trigger as a button click or page visit.

Why are they important?

Here are multiple reasons why having in-app events set up is key to your startup’s success: