What are the key metrics to be captured for a streaming service product?

Question is quite broad, so let us measure metrics for entire product. Overall goal would be to have a well adopted streaming product with healthy number of paid users.

3 & 4. User journey & Related Metrics

Focussing on metrics in user journey:

- Acquisition : Number of app installs

- Activation/Adoption : First stream, setting up playlist

- Engagement : monthly active users, frequency of daily/weekly login, time spent every session, accessing diversified content

- Retention : 6 month user retention

- Monetization : % of paid users, time taken for conversion

- Referral : number of referrals, number of referral conversions

5. Evaluate Metrics

Evaluating some of the metrics mentioned above

Metrics	Significance to Product Objectives	Confidence in Accuracy of metric	Level of effort to measure metric
Number of app installs	High	Medium	Low
First stream	Medium	Low	Low
Playlists creation	Low	Low	Low
MAU	High	High	Medium
Freq of login	High	Medium	Low
Time spent	High	Medium	Low
Accessing diversified content	Medium	Medium	Medium
6 month user retention	Medium	Medium	Low
% of paid users	High	High	Low
Conversion rate	High	High	Low
Number of referrals	Medium	Low	Low
Referral conversions	High	High	Low

6. Prioritize Metrics

MAU - Key metric to analyze how engaged users are on a monthly basis

Frequency of login - tells us stickiness of the app with respect to a user

Time spent on app - Allows us to understand quantitative engagement

% of paid users - important metric for revenue

Referral conversions - Understand how many people are willing to install app based on referrals from their friends and family.

Prateek Sachdeva · Answer 2 · 2023-09-04T07:19:31+0000

Clarifying questions:

Could you please specify for which product are we capturing these metrics? (Netflix)
Are we defining these metrics with a certain goal / problem statement in mind? (Netflix has recently launched a cheaper student plan in India. what key metrics would you track for it)
Why was this plan launched? (To basically acquire more users from the student population)
Could you please specify the key features of this plan? (It’s a slightly cheaper plan for students (we are validating this with their college/ school ids), its available on a single device (either mobile/ laptop), with only one user profile, all the other features of Netflix are the same, launched for both ios and android users)
Is it only for new users? Can existing users switch to a mobile student plan? New users only.
Has this been launched pan India? Yes Are we running any A/B tests to validate this product? No

Goal:

Mission of Netflix: To build a seamless entertainment platform for its users that is the one stop solution for all users entertainment woes. This is on the consumer side but on the creator side, Netflix is bridging a gap that has existed between creators and consumers of content.

With the new mobile plan that has been launched for Netflix. Our primary goal is new user adoption. And also engagement & retention (because we would like to see these new users deriving value and being retained as well)

Actions:

What would the user journey look like? (for student mobile plan user)

Pre-onboarding

user will come across the Netflix mobile plan through (word of mouth (referral), marketing campaign, social media, paid ads etc.)
user will download the app from playstore/ app store
User will open the app.

Onboarding

user will create a profile (being a new user) (input email address, password etc.)
user will see the multiple plans available. User will select the mobile plan.
user will provide additional verifications like (college / school student email id)
user will provide any referral code if any.
user will finish creating the account
user will give his payment information to start the free trial.

Post-Onboarding

user will set up his/ her content preferences
user will browse the homepage
user will look at multiple titles/ recommended
user will search for titles
user will start watching a movie/ show
user will either complete watching it or stop midway
If stopped midway then user will remove it from the watchlist
User will continue to watch content on Netflix or the user can churn
user might cancel the trial subscription before trial expiry
user will renew the trial.

Metrics:

Acquisition / Activation metrics:

# users coming on Netflix via referrals
# users coming in via social media channels
#users coming in via paid ads
Increase in app downloads (before plan and after launch) (device wise breakdown - ios & android)
users signing up for the mobile plan
# users churning at the point where we are asking them to input college email ids/ upload college id
# users who signed up for the mobile plan and finished setting up their profile

Engagement metrics:

users who finish watching atleast 1 movie / series on Netflix after signing up
users who watch content atleast once a week (week on week)

Retention metrics:

users who cancel free trial
user who renew subscriptions after 3 months.

Evaluate:

It’s important to track where we are getting most of our users from after starting marketing campaigns. It’s a key adoption metric.

We also need to see how many users would finish the payment process and setting up their profile.

Because the college id is a new feature, we need to understand whether users are churning at this point as (Many students don’t have this).

We also need a device wise breakdown about our app downloads. This would further finetune our adoption metrics.

For engagement metrics, I would just look at the number of users who are actually watching content every week (as this is a core action on the platform)

and for retention I am primarily interested in how many people are continuing to use the platform after 3 months.