In the previous section we saw how the new features began to pick up some engagement, but fell short of materially changing the way people engaged with the feed, as evidenced by the overwhelming attention that Hints still gets over other features:
Life Events (Bmd Clicked in the bar graph) and Surnames together suggest that if it didn't change the game of the feed the set of new features did positively bring some users back to the app for short sessions. Another good sign came from Share metrics:
Up until this point Photolines was seen as a success in terms of shares, so it was nice to see Life Events and especially Surnames perform well.
Percentage clicked also makes Life Events and Surnames look good compared to other efforts to grow overall engagement with the feed:
In the fullness of time, however, there is no denying that these features did not significantly change the app. By that I mean that the overwhelming amount of sessions that include reviewing hints do not also include looking at these other types of content. People for the most part have continued to come to the app to do what they always do at Ancestry: core genealogy activities:
The above chart says it all, but as part of this we always looked at the overall behavior of the app as it relates to usage and stickiness:
As evidenced by the DAU chart, usage of the Ancestry app is constant, and without extreme changes: it is a weekend app (see how usage rises every Thursday and peaks every Sunday). As suggested by the MAU chart, it is hard to even measure strategies at the level of the entire Discover feed when plotted against numbers at such a high level.
And just for the love of industry, let's see if we can measure any bump in retention in the six months after the release of these features:
In all, the learnings from the process of designing, launching, and monitoring these features are that they did report some gains in terms of engagement, but there is little that can be said about the impact of even the Discover feed in general when looked at through the lens of stickiness, let alone retention. What this suggests to me is that this set of features did make the app work better for the cohort that was already on there, but didn't particularly appear to bring in a new cohort.