A Word on User Acquisition

I vacillated between titling this post “user acquisition” or “customer acquisition” – the latter has some business model implications so I decided to go with the former, but alas in these economic times we’ll need to revisit the latter very soon.

So, you have a cool website/app now how do you get people to actually use it? If we boil it down, there are three main ways in which users find new websites:

1. They search for it
2. They find out about it through a friend
3. They find out about it in the media

All three channels can be either free or paid channels, they can also be online or offline channels. This lends itself to a neat little matrix. I made the size of the bubbles to be an estimate of how “big” each channel is. I think that the best measure of “big” is attention and impact, so if anyone has any input on how big the bubbles should be (and the data driving it), I’m looking to make this more accurate.

We can do a deep dive on each of these user acquisition channels as well as the tools that are relevant for each. That said, the first two questions every company has to answer for itself are (1) Which channels are most appropriate for my business? and (2) How do I minimize the acquisition cost for my channels?

This also raises another question about return on investment (ROI) and how to make sure that you keep that positive based on what you know (or estimate) the lifetime value (LTV) of a user to be. Sounds simple, but to make good decisions you need to ensure you can segment LTV by channel (and optimally to an even more granular level), which requires robust metrics and instrumentation. Further, you may have little to no data on LTV, which makes it ever more difficult to produce adequate estimates.