What are the metrics for Google Photos?

Understanding & Clarification

First off let's just establish a common understanding of what Google Photos is and how it's used. Google Photos is a mobile, desktop, and browser based app that allows users to both view, store, organize, and share photos. It is a member of the Google Workspace set of tools.

In order to set the stage for this question, I think it's important to view Google Photos in the context of it's parent company and it's mission. Google's mission statement is to make the worlds information universally accessible and useful. Google Photos directly supports this mission by allowing users to store, organize, and easily access their photos which are information. Strategically speaking Google Photos is definitely more of a free value ad for users and not directly a monetization play.

Metrics

There are a bunch of different metrics we could use to measure Google Photos' success, in order to provide structure and stay organized I like to group them by the different steps in the user lifecycle.

• Awareness - # of Users who have downloaded or clicked on the Google Photos app
• Activation - # of users who have uploaded a photo
• Engagement - Average number of photos uploaded per user / week, average number of photo views per user / week, # of users who view at least 10 photos per week, # of users who upload 2 or more photos per week
• Retention - % of users who uploaded at least 2 photos last week who also uploaded at least 2 photos this week, % of users who viewed at least 10 photos last week who also viewed at least 10 photos this week
• Monetization - Going to ignore this as we mentioned monetization was not important for this particular product's goal.
• Referral - Average number of shared photo views per user

Prioritization

As mentioned above, Google Photos is more of a free value ad aimed at giving users another reason to use the Google Workspace suite of apps. Given how ubiquitous Google Workspace is I'm going to make the assumption that users are aware of Google Photos and we have a healthy user base. 

With the above points in mind, I'm going to suggest we focus on prioritizing monitoring engagement to indicate Google Photo's success. If users are using and engaging with our product then that is a good proxxy for whether or not they are getting value out of it.

In order to measure engagement, I'm going to propose we focus on monitoring the average number of photo views per user / week. I like this metric because it is a relative metric as opposed to an absolute metric like the total number of photo views per week. The latter would ebb and flow with the total number of users on the platform.

Additionally, I like measuring views over uploads because views implies that there are uploads present to be viewed.

Downsides

While I am confident that our chosen metric, average number of photo views per use / week, is a good indicator of success for Google Photos, no metric is perfect.

Our chosen metric is fairly high level, it does not give us much insight into what types of photos are being uploaded and viewed. Are these family photos or professional photographers storing their work?

Additionally, we aren't monitoring the use case where users primarily use the app for storage instead of viewing. Users could be uploading their photos and then downloading them for other purposes without spending a bunch of time viewing them within Google Photos.

Also, we would want to look at how Google Photos impacts the overall health of the Google Workplace suite. If users start uploading their photos directly to Google Photos we might see a decrease in Google Drive usage.

Summary

In order to measure the success of Google Photos at helping users both store and view there photos we are going to approximate engagement by monitoring the average number of photos viewed per user / week.