How would you measure the success of Google Photos?

How would you measure the success of Google Photos?

 

Some clarifications - 

1/ Google photos is the photos storage app in Andorid which helps creating memories and stores your pictures through time -> Yes

2/ When we say ‘success’ did you want to focus on anything specific, else we can work through it in this exercise

 

Here is the structure ->

We will talk about the user base

Define the journey of the user base

Identify metrics along the way

Zero down on what is the most important metric that aligns with the goal of the app and hence for that we need to define the goal of the app.

 

Goal of Google photos -> Home for all photos and videos to bring memories to life and save/cherish what matters

 

Current user base is 1 billion

 

Journey -> 

Awareness -> User made aware of google photos

Acquire -> User starting to use google photos

Use -> User using different parts of the product across through their lifecycle

Proponent -> Users ‘selling’ google photos for us

Exit -> Users stopping to use google photos

 

Awareness ->

1/ External awareness (ads, friends)

2/ Internal device awareness

Metrics are - Ads run, awareness campaigns run through proponents

 

Acquire ->

1/ New users starting to use photos

2/ User that left us coming back

 

Use ->

1/ Users using functionality such as -

• Storing

• Searching

• Creating memories

• Tagging

• Sharing

• Deleting

• Organizing

• Printing

Main metrics are -> 

• activities done per user per day/week/month

• DAU, WAU, MAU

 

Proponents

Referrals done by users to non users through photos/memories sharing

• Sharings per day, week, month

• New apps installed through those sharings

 

Exit

• Users dropped off after a month of use

• Laggards using every few months

 

Monetization

• Storage

• Printing

 

Given the goal is to be the one place to store, share and create memories -> metrics i would focus on is active users and activities done by active users. This is important because this will tell us how well are able to keep users engaged, make them repeat users and have a great convenient experience.

 

 

How would you measure the success of Google Photos?

Google photos is a cloud-based photo sharing and storage service developed by google. It allows multiple users to upload and access photos and videos via mobile, tablet, PCs. It also provides several other options such as filters, crop etc.

Goal:- capturing the market thus more engagement and generating more revenue.

 User journey:-

1.User clicks the photos.

2.Upload it on the google photos(automatic process).

3.edit the photos.

4.share with friends/family members.

 

Metric:-

·       Activation

1.       How many people have used it at least once during a session?

·       Engagement

1. number of photos per user

2. number of content per user per category(eg. photos, videos)

3. average time spent per user during a session

·       Referral

1.number of shares per user(means from one account how many people are connected on an average)

·       Retention

1.       7 day retention

2.       30 day retention

·       Monetization

1.       Total ads clicks during a session

2.       no. of people taken subscription for good quality and more storage.

Prioritizing the metric:- I am choosing  number of photos per user, average time spent per user during  a session, total ads clicks during a session,no. of people taken subscription for good quality and more storage as per our goal.

 

What users can do with Google Photos: 

1. upload photos 
2. store photos
3. view photos
4. search photos
5. memories animations
6. buy plans
7. add family
8. app installs

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metrics:

upload photos:

1. # of photos uploaded per week

2. # of users manually uploading per week

3. # of users automatically syncing per week 

4. # of users for which uploads failed 

store photos:

1. amount of gb used for storage per week 

view photos:

1. # app opens per week 

2. # of min spent on app per week 

search photos:

1. search by text

2. search by face

memory animations

1. # of notifications

2. # of opens

3. # of users who watched the animations completely

buy plans

1. # of free users vs # of paid users

2. # of users who churned

add family

1. # of users who add family

2. # of users who share photos links with family

app installs

1. # of app installs

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prioritize metrics

Google photos is a mature app (so revenue is important). 

it has competitors from amazon photos and icloud photos (so app installs and engagement is important). 

so these are the final metrics i would like to prioritize

competition

# of app installs

engagement

# app opens per week

# of min spent on app per week 

# of photos uploaded per week

revenue

# of free users vs # of paid users 

1. Describe the product - Google photos is a photo storage and sharing application. User can upload photos or videos, they can create albums to group photos or videos, they can share photos with other google users, they can share albums. You can search for photos 

2. Goal of Google photos - The app itself if free. Google makes money on cloud storage. So the more pics users upload to google photos, they more money google will make. So primary goal would be to increase revenue from storage. Google can also use the content for training their AI/ML models and optimizing search tools. So overall, I think the goal of google photos is to increase the number of photos and videos that leads to increased revenue from storage. There are also many other photo sharing apps like Apple has a photos app which are also free. So there is a competition in the market on which app is the most popular. So I think increasing the number of users for the google photos app will also be a goal for this product. 

3. User journey 

1. User downloads the app 
2. User logs in with their google account and sets up the app 
3. User uploads photos and videos
4. User organizes them into albums by time, event, or other methods
5. User shares photos with friends and family
6. User searches for a photo 
7. User requires additional storage for the photos app when they run out of storage

1. # of app dowloads
2. # of users who logged into the app after downloading, # of users who created a profile within the app 
3. avg # of photos or videos uploaded per user per month, avg storage used per user for photos
4. avg # of albums per user
5. avg # of photos shared per user, avg # of albums shared per user, avg # of users who viewed shared photos or albums, avg # of invites to collaborate on albums (ex. multiple users uploading pics to an album from their recent trip), frequency of sharing per user (how often a user shares an album)
6. # of search queries per day per user 
7. avg # of users buying more storage per month, avg storage amount purchased per month by existing users

5. Prioritize Metrics

1 and 2 are important metrics to track as they indicate how many new users are being acquired and activated. But it is a weak metric of success as downloading the app and logging in don't result into increase in revenue directly until the users start uploading photos. #3 is a strong metric that indicates if users are increasing their usage of Google Photos. #4 is about organizing, so not directly relevant to increase in revenue though it is a useful feature that must be tracked from an adoption perspective. #5 indicates engagement -> if more users engage using a common photo sharing application, it can drive an increase in # of users for that app (ex. if a group of 5 is collaborating to create an album of their recent trip and 4 use google photos, 5th person will automatically have to use the same app). #6 is not a direct indicator of growth in usage. #7 is a good metric but storage can be used for a lot of things so it is hard to say if user purchased more storage for photos or something else. 

In summary, I would say that the measure of success of google photos is #3 -> avg # of photos or videos uploaded per user per month, avg storage used per user for photos, followed by #5

 

Describe the product: Google photos helps in organising the photos and videos and store the same in a structured manner so that user can access it in future to refresh the memories

Clarification/Assumptions

1.      Is compatible for android users or apple users as well? Assuming for android users

2.      Are there any specific versions of phones where it does not work?

3.      Users can use it in phone as well as through desktop/laptop embedded in gmail

4.      How we can define success? Assuming revenue generation and increasing customer engagement

5.      Every user is having maximum one unique account associated with google photos and drive to store the photos

Who are the users?

Business users like professional photo shooters for wedding, modelling, news reporters.

Individual users those who would like to take pics from cell phone and save it as memory, photos taken for documenting purpose like taking picture of an accident at the moment to save as evidence.

Value Proposition from user’s perspective

1.      Ability to click the photos and save it as memory in a structured manner

2.      Changing the camera device example phone where users change the device on an average once in 2 years and lose the data or need to manage the data transfer carefully.

3.      Google photos has given an option to the cell phone device makers to remove the gallery feature as now the pics and videos can be directly saved in the google photos

4.      Instead of manging the hardware devices like pen drives (which might get lost over the period of time) the users can use google photos where data is managed in the cloud through google drive

5.      Photos saved in google photo can be accessed from anywhere through any mobile device even offline

6.      Even if cell phone device is damaged the photos and videos remain preserved which is unlikely to happen using pend drives

7.      Google photos saves the pics with event details, like birthday, place and time and thus shares a beautiful auto compilation of memories to the users so that they can rejuvenate the moments which is unlikely to happen using pen drives. Data management is a manual activity in such devices

8.      Integration with facebook and whatsup helps the user to store and manage all the photos in google in a user-friendly manner. They need not to hop over multiple hardware devices to collect the videos and photos

User journey

I would like to opt the cell phone as device to measure the success of google photos as it is being used by the masses across the countries.

A user login to the gmail account and set the google photo app. Clicks the photos from the mobile camera and the system saves the pics in google that gets stored in google drive.

User can take get the pics and videos from whatsapp, as screenshot, downloaded from any websites and follow the same journey

A user opens the google photos and revisit the respective folders to see the photos and delete them as needed.

Metrics

1.      Average number of times does user visits google photos in a day considering the cell phone devices are being in the custody of user through out the day. Users even kept the cell phone device near the head while sleeping and can peep inside google photos in the mid night if unable to sleep

2.      Percentage of people who deletes the unwanted pics and videos to manage limited space

3.      Average amount of time being spent by each user on google photos

4.      How many time the user has logged out from drive and google photos. Assuming the user can stay login in device even if not using the app

5.      Average number of photos added by the user periodically by the user

6.      Average number of photos downloaded periodically by the user

7.      Average number of photos deleted by the user

8.      Percentage increase in the users buying the storage space in google drive to keep the back up pf photos and videos

9.      Revenue generated and the % increase in revenue from the users who buys additional storage space

10.   Click through rate, average time the user spends while clicking inside the app and clicking to move out of the app

Evaluation

Metric no.	Reach to customer	Impact size	Efforts
1	H	H	L
2	M	L	L
3	H	H	L
4	H	H	M
5	H	H	M
6	H	H	L
7	L	L	L
8	H	M	M
9	H	M	L
10	H	H	L

 

 

What is Google Photos

Google Photos is a image sharing application from Google, that let's users upload and share pictures of their life, with their group of friends. 

It lets image owners creates albums, search for pictures within their albums with keyword search, edit pictures using filters, print pictures.  

It lets image viewers engage with the content, by leaving comments, joining an album, contributing their own pictures to the event, tag users in a picture.

 

Google's Mission and How Google Photos contributes towards that mission

Alphanet's and Google's mission is to make the world around you universally accessible and useful and organizing world's information respectively. Google Photos ties well into that mission by letting people organize their life memories and sharing with their communities. This helps towards building communities and making life more meaningful and useful for people.

Goal

Given the current stage of Google Photos, it is most important to measure user engagement and retention, as it has been around for a long time and peole are well aware of the product. By increasing engagement and retention, it will help more and more people derive the value from the product, and also might help us make the product better

So we will focus on enagement and retention metrics for the product as the goal.

Users and User Journey

We will touch upon who the users are and go through their journey to identify some areas where we can measure success metrics for the applications.

Users can be classified as 

1. Content creators - Image uploader, Album creators

2. Content consumers - Viewers, Commentators

User Journey - We will focus only on the mobile user experience to narrow the scope. It is also possibly the predomniant form factor for this app.

1. Awareness, Acquisiton - Users download the app and sign in with their Google Account.

2. Activation - Upload the first image, Share Image, View the image or album.

3. Engagement - Creators upload images, create and share albums. Consumers view images, engage with the album through likes, comments and shares. They can even join an album and upload pictures to it or tag others in an album.

4. Retention - Creators and consumers continue to use the service to do the above tasks in a periodic basis.

Metrics

We will focus on engagement and retention metrics like we called out above, since those are the areas when improved will lead to higher user satisfaction, keep users coming back to the platform and eventually lead to better monetization and growth for the app/company.

I would like to classify these metrics into 3 categories - Tracking metrics, North Star Metrics, and Counter Metrics

Engagement

1. Tracking metrics - 

  a. Number of pictures uploaded for a period of time (day, week, month)

  b. Number of albums watched for 1000 albums created

  c. Engagement score for 1000 viewed albums (This could be a weighted aggregate metric of comments, likes and shares, with shares getting higher weight, followed by comments and likes)

d. Daily, Weekly, Monthly Active Users, active defined by a user who at least views or uploads one photo/album in a week. 

2. North Star Metric - 

a. Time spent on the app (TOS) - The eventual goal for Google Photos is to get people to spend increased time on the platform. 

b. Number of albums/photos viewed/ 100 mins of time spent on app - But we must be careful to ensure that this is meaningful time that the users are spending and they are getting value from it. Some ways to ensure that users are finding value with their time spent on app is to have a relative of albums/photos viewed, engaged with for every 100 mins of time spent on Google Photos. We want to work with data scientists to ensure that this number is kept at a reasonable limit.  

3. Counter Metrics - 

We want to watch for the following counter metrics and ensure they stay low so as to avoid branding risk

  a. Number of reported albums

  b. Number of reported users

  c. Number of albums/photos viewed/ 100 mins of time spent on app - This metric should stay at a reasonable value (say 30-40 pictures per 100 mins. Actual values can be worked out with data science teams)

d. Dislike counts

Prioritization of metrics

We would prirotize metrics 1a, 1c, 2b for tracking and NSM and watch for 3a and 3b counter metrics to ensure the quality of the content remains high

Goal: 

Candidate: Google might use photos to augment the google ecosystem by serving incerasing number of use cases for the customers where customers can use photos to store images, share with friends/family, etc. It will help to build a moot around various suite of services that google offers. So I assume the goal is to drive the user adoption rather than the revnue.

Interviewer: Yes, it is to drive the user adoption.

Actions:

I intend to brainstorm various actions that users can take when they engage with google photos that could be used as a measure of user adoption

A) downloading google photos from app store

B) storing images and videos to the google photos

C) sharing photos and videos from google photos to other people through social media (whatsapp, facebook, youtube), mail (gmail, yahoo mail), etc

D) editing images and photos on google photos

E) viewing media stored on google photos

F) bookmarking favorite files on the google photos

I would prioritize top of the funnel metrics to track, to get a sense of broader user base and their actitivities.

Metrics: 

The metrics that I would track to measure the user adoption of the google photos is a) numer of google photo downloads b) number of users that use photos to store images and videos c) number of users that share content through google photos

Evualations/trade-offs:

These metrics would not differentiate between deep enagement and shallow enagement. For example, heavy users that collect, store and share few thousands of files to ones that have few hundreds. 

 

Mission -> World-class digital memory box of photos

Vision -> Rapidly become worlds biggest photo repository

Customer segment --> People care about High-quality photos that may be taken at their wedding or special events. Want to be able to share conveniently, using other products in google suite( Gmail, drive, etc)

Objective -> 1. Create a better customer experience and generate revenue ( by selling disk space or creating a market place to connect studios with users)

Competition ->  Box and Dropbox

Product differentiation --> Compression algorithm to reduce the size of photos while still maintaining quality. 2. Platform integration and ease of sharing via Gmail and Drive. 3. Marketplace to connect studios and Users

Customer Journey -- Trigger notification -> create a new account --> Add photos --> Organise folders --> Share albums --> edit/view photos --> exit the platform

When can we say the product was a success ??

1. Customer Acquisition spent (Ad, marketing) is less than of the  CLT

2. Total number of users acquired is 0.5% of the total google's user-base

3. Engagement -- in Year 1 --- uploading, sharing, and organizing is at least 50% of the engagement of other competitors (year 1)

4. Retention -- heavy users (30% of the total users active on google photos ) visit 4-5 times a month on the platform

5. Monetization --  adding marketplace and selling space -- should be 50 million in year 1( less revenue expectation since we are a new player in the market and want to focus on user acquisition)

6. Technology -- Our compression algorithm should decrease at least 10% of the storage size compared to other platforms

7. Net promoter score

 

Prioritization -- Based on Objectives and Vision -- I would focus on Acquisition and Engagement

Summarisation

 

Product Description

In my understanding Google photos is photo storage and sharing service developed by Google. Google photos allows users to:

1. Back up their photos and videos and making them accessible from their phone, tablets, computers.
2. Search their photo library to easily find specific picture or set of pictures.
3. Pool photos with friends and family members by creating shared albums.
4. Enables users to comment on pictures thus creating a social platform within a shared album

   Is my understanding correct?

*Let us move ahead with the assumption that this understanding is correct.

Goal

As stated above Google photos is built to store and organize the photos automatically. This is quite in line with the goal of the company ‘To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’.

The goal of Google Photos is to become a one stop solution for the users to manage a huge media library.

I’ll say the main goal is engagement with secondary goal of retention, referral and acquisition.

 User Journey

Now let us take a look at the user journey while using Google Photos and prioritize the features on a scale of 1-5 (5- highest priority)

1. User installs the app. This shows that the user is aware about the app and is interested is using it. I would like to prioritize this as 3, because in almost all android devices it is pre-install. So it doesn’t clearly indicate that the user installed the app because he has the desire to try the app.
2. User uses it to create/edit pictures/videos. This indicates the engagement of user with the app. I will mark it as 5.
3. User takes a regular backup of the pictures/videos in Google Photos. This indicates if the user is actually interested in using this as its primary backup medium. Therefore I would like to rate it as 5.
4. User creates a shared album with friends/family. This leads to referring Photos to users in the shared album that might not have tried the product yet. This also signals the engagement of the user. So I will prioritize it as 5.
5. Users in shared album comment on the uploaded content. This feature is also indicative of user engagement, however the goal of app is not to increase social interaction within the app therefore I’ll rate it as 3.
6. Users download, share the automatic creation (auto edited pictures, memories in the form of collages, videos, gif) of Google Photos. This is also targeted to keep the users engaged, even though this is not the primary purpose of the Photos, but this metric also leads us to identify if the users like the enhancements suggested by the app, so I’ll rate it as 4.
7. Users use the search feature of the app to filter the media files. I will rate it as 2 as the user might not have the need to search the content in the library very frequently.

On top of the above metric, I would like to also look into one higher level engagement metric that is stickiness. It helps us define how likely the user is to return and use Photo app for sharing the media.

  

Prioritize the metrics

 

1	2	3	4	5
	Filter media files using the search.	User installs the app. Users in shared album comment on the uploaded content	Users download, share the automatic creation (auto edited pictures, memories in the form of collages, videos, gif) of Google Photos	- Users use it to edit pictures/videos and create collages, gifs. - User takes a regular backup of the pictures/videos in Google Photos - User creates a shared album with friends/family

 

Now that we have come up with a few metric on the engagement of Photos, let us see the priority:

• % increase in the number of users using the Photos app to create/edit and backup the media files in a week.
• % increase in the number new shared albums created by users in a week.
• Stickiness.
• % increase in the number of new users added in shared albums in a week.
• % increase in the number of downloads/share of the content created automatically by AI per week.
• % increase in the number of activities in shared album (such as number of views, commenting) per week.
• % increase in the number of new users per week.
• Churn rate per month.

 

Summary

Google Photos is created by Google to increase user engagement by sharing their data (pictures/videos) with a goal to be single largest media library. By looking at the user journey we are able to figure out key metrics to measure the success. Metrics such as % increase in the of users using the app to create, edit and backup media content, % in the number of shared albums, stickiness, churn rate per month would clearly help us measure the success of Google Photos.