“We don't just craft applications; we bring stories to life.”
As leading mobile app publisher Luni sees it, the company isn’t merely coding apps, it's “scripting stories that jump off your screen and into the real world.”
Luni’s success—its Fitness Coach is one of the most popular fitness apps in the U.S.—hinges on its ability to function as an app studio that ideates, builds, launches, and maintains successful and innovative mobile applications.
Core to this ability: data.
“Smartphones have become such an important part of our lives, sitting in our pockets throughout the entire day,” says Adrien Dulong, chief operating officer (COO) at Omada, one of Luni’s latest ventures and an innovative take on sports betting that has over a million monthly active users worldwide. “But because of this, the mobile app market has become crowded and it is literally a fight for attention.”
“At Luni, we believe that data is our competitive advantage. It enables us to understand user behavior and market dynamics. This is exactly the culture that I looked to instill when I joined the company three years ago.”
Moving from vanity metrics to actionable insights
When Adrien first arrived at Luni, he noticed the company was tracking data but the tool the company was using at the time illuminated little. “It seemed like everyone was tracking metrics just for the sake of tracking metrics,” Adrien says. “I’ve seen this in the past when companies use a tool such as Google Analytics, which provides high-level vanity metrics but cannot provide the depth of insight needed to understand real-time mobile user behavior.” Adrien’s goal was to make sure that each team at Luni was capable of making the best decisions for their products. This meant finding a solution that was powerful enough to offer deep insights while being easy enough to adopt across the entire organization.
“The only way to create a data-driven culture within your organization is to make sure that the data is in the hands of everyone who needs it. Especially in our environment where user behaviors are changing so rapidly. . . . delays of even 24 hours would render the data obsolete.”
Adrien turned to Amplitude, which he believed would be the right solution for Luni. “I’ve been using Amplitude throughout my career, for almost ten years now and I have never been disappointed,” he reflects. “The magic of Amplitude is that you can start simple with automated charts, and then drill down into the data if you need more information.”
“From my experience, Amplitude makes people feel empowered. It enables you to better understand your products, to start asking more questions, and to become more invested in the business as a whole.”
Fostering collaboration across all teams
Adrien has succeeded in creating a data-driven culture: Out of the 70 employees at Luni, 40 are active users of Amplitude. “There are so many ways that we use Amplitude today,” Adrien observes:
- Product teams use Amplitude on a daily basis to understand the impact and penetration of new features that are being shipped.
- Technical teams use Amplitude to detect anomalies and bugs in their applications
- Marketing teams use cohorts to better understand which countries they need to target.
- Finance teams use Amplitude to look at the progression of average revenue per daily active user (ARPDAU) and average revenue per user (ARPU) from a revenue perspective.
Amplitude’s funnel analysis is one of Luni’s most-used charts. As Adrien explains: “There is an initial first action that we want all new users to take. We know that if users take this action, they will then be more engaged in our application and we will see higher retention rates. Funnel analysis enables us to see the number of new users that downloaded our app and the percentage of users that take their first action.”
The funnel analysis chart has also helped drive collaboration between the product and marketing teams. “We had noticed in the past a high number of app downloads, followed by a high drop-off,” Adrien recalls. “We worked with the marketing team and realized that they were targeting users that were not very qualified, at a low cost per acquisition.” To Adrien, it’s proof that product and marketing teams need to share the same analytics data.
“The fact is, product and marketing have to be able to work together if you want to see the right level of engagement and retention over time in your mobile apps.”
Driving business results through experimentation
At Luni, teams are encouraged to test hypotheses and validate their ideas. Amplitude serves as a powerful solution for experimentation, helping Luni assess the business value of new features. According to Adrien, “Amplitude Experiment is integral to our teams. We scrutinize the entire funnel to see the impact on metrics like the ARPU within the initial first 30 days of the test.”
For the Omada application, conversion rates are closely linked to the sports events that are taking place during the day. Conversion rates will always be higher on a day when there is an important Champion’s League game, for example. The dynamic nature of engagement and conversion rates, influenced by sports events, creates an added layer of complexity for the company. “We have to make sure that we create a testing strategy that takes into account external events,” Adrien notes.
“Having our A/B tests part of the same platform as our digital analytics enables us to be a lot more precise. It helps us trust the data we use for these tests because we know that we will be able to dig into the data to understand the bigger picture.”
Adrien cites an experiment that his team ran, which boosted conversion rates by 10%. The experiment grew out of Luni’s recognition that some users did not seem familiar with the daily games Omada offers. “Recognizing the potential impact on conversion rates, we hypothesized that allowing users to personally select games they wanted to bet on, rather than relying on pre-selections, could enhance user engagement,” Adrien says. “This hypothesis was put to the test using Amplitude, and the results were compelling: a notable 10% increase in conversion rates!”
Adrien’s advice to anyone looking to take on experimentation and foster a data-driven culture is to take it one step at a time. “There’s no point in trying to track every single event that is taking place in your application from the get go,” he observes. “You need to be strategic and really think about the key actions that have the biggest impact on the KPIs you are trying to drive. Start with the essentials, and then build up your data strategy from there.”
Want to see how Amplitude can help you create a more data-driven, collaborative culture at your organization? Get started with Amplitude for free.
