Facebook is launching a money transfer feature. What would you choose as success metrics?

Clarification

First off let’s get on the same page regarding what a money transfer feature looks like. What I’m envisioning is basically a Venmo clone integrated into the core Facebook product. Users can send and receive money peer-to-peer as well as send money to businesses. For example, John’s Lawn Care just mowed my lawn and I can send them payment through my Facebook account, with a linked credit card or bank account, to their verified business page. The Facebook core product already has a massive user base so we will integrate it into the existing product instead of making a standalone app.

Context

Let’s also make sure we understand the bigger picture here, why is Facebook launching a money transfer feature? Facebook’s mission is to bring the world closer together. By adding a money transfer feature Facebook is making it easier for people to exchange their goods and services thus deriving value from being a member of a community on Facebook.

Users

We mentioned this briefly above, but it’s important so I’m going to call it out again. Our users here can either be individual users or organizations on the platform. Both of which can either be senders or receivers of payments.

Feature Goal

Facebook the product is incredibly mature and already has ~3B users. A product at this stage is less focused on acquiring new users and more so on keeping their existing users happy. The goal of our money transfer feature will be to increase retention on the platform by increasing engagement.

Metrics

For a newly launched feature we’re going to want to measure adoption aka are our users actually using this new thing we’ve built. We can monitor this through:

1. Weekly Active Users: To qualify a user must have sent or received money in the past week

   1. Weekly seems like the right cadence sending / receiving money

Once we’ve established users are actually using our feature we are going to want to know how much are they using it? Also known as Engagement.

2. Average number of transactions per user

3. Percentage of users who have sent or received money three or more times in a week

4. Average dollar amount of money being sent or received in a transaction

Seeing both adoption and solid engagement for our newly launched feature is great, but I would still be concerned about users coming in and kicking the tires for the sake of it or just playing around with the new shiny toy we’ve built. To address these concerns we would want to look at the retention of our product.

5. Percentage of users who sent or received money the previous week, who also sent or received money this week. 

Concerns

No set of metrics is perfect so let’s talk about some concerns or gaps that our metrics aren’t addressing.

1. We are launching a new product and started off with measuring adoption. Inherent here is the assumption that we’ve already successfully made users aware of our new feature and they were able to activate it aka put in their financial information / send a payment. Adoption is downstream from both awareness and activation so if we weren’t seeing a lot of adoption we could work backwards to figure out where the issue is.

2. While intentional, the above metrics are pretty top level. They don’t offer much in terms of granularity when it comes to our users or their different use cases. A 19 year old is going to have very different money transferring habits than a lawncare business.

3. Facebook is a complex product with a lot of functionality and when you add a new feature you are inherently competing with the other pieces of functionality for the user’s attention. We would want to make sure we aren’t negatively impacting other areas of the product and more importantly that we are increasing engagement with the Facebook platform overall.

Summary

As Facebook’s Money Transfer is a newly launched feature we are first going to measure adoption to ensure that users are actually using what we’ve just built. Next we are going to approximate how much value they are getting out of the new feature by measuring their engagement with it and finally we are going to confirm our product-market fit for this new feature by monitoring the retention of our users.