What would be the top six metrics for WhatsApp? Now pick one from the six. Tell me three things you would do to improve that metric.

Use this guidance for answering this Google metrics question:

Whatsapp is a messaging platform that helps stay friends, family and colleagues stay connected. Users can send messages or call people using VOIP. Before Whatsapp people had problems communicating as sending and receiving messages between cross mobile operating systems was difficult and Whatsapp broke those barriers.

Users:

1.      1:1 conversation

2.      Group conversations

Whatsapp already has the largest user base hence I don’t think their focus would be on the acquisition, based on their current business component model, the focus is on engagement and retention. The current set of features in Whatsapp are not tightly driven with the motive to monetize.

Engagement & Retention       

1.      Daily Active Users [ Who performed at least one action like changing the profile pic, sending a message, making a video call, checking the status, saving a message etc)

2.      Total number of conversations / days [ An active conversation is having at least four to and fro conversations in a thread]

3.      Total number of video calls made / day

4.      DAU: MAU ratio [ This helps explain the stickiness to the product]

5.      No. of status updates / day

6.      No. of new groups created / day

I will go with the second metric as it talks about the quality of engagement and the other two do not.

How would we improve the total conversations / day?

I would like to brainstorm some of the painpoints we have today and come up with solutions that tie back to our metric here.

1.      Providing ability to the user to be able to send e gifts

2.      Reminder of someone’s birthday as a notification

3.      Identifying the intent of the user and suggesting simple short answers [ pre-defined short text answers like – Thankyou, will do, sure, congratulations]

Clarification 

There could be differnt metrics if we look at various aspect of whatsapp. To answer this question we will not be looking at business metrics such as revenue, costs, profit. We'll only look at it from product perspective. Additionally, marketing metrics such as new user acquisition, retetion are out of the scope as whatsapp is becoming a very mature product.

• DAU - Daily Active Users 
  • This is one of the imporant metrics as communicating with each other is almost a daily activity
• daily number of messages sent 
  • This indicates how many messages are sent on platform. if this number is increasing while DAU is same, it will indicate people are increasing their frequency of sending messages
  • we can further divide this into
    • number of texts
    • number of images 
    • audio and doc share is not that important
• weekly active groups
  • This indicates how often people engage in groups 
  • it is also important because group usage indicates more user engagement and with many at once
  • This can be one of the early indicators if people are engaging less on platform as group activity reduces when people stop active usage of a platform
• daily number of status created
  • This is a matrix to indicate how often people share their lives with contacts
  • increaase in this activity indicates increased usage apart from direct messages  (dm)
• daily average number of followers per status
  • This indicates if people are watching status shared by their contacts. 
  • if this number is reducing then it either means people are not interested in checking out others status or they are using mute status option more
• daily number of calls placed 
  • This indicates number of call activity as people tend to connect with ones near to them on calls only. additionally, it indicates user preference over connecting through telecom provider. 
    • Audio calls
    • Video Calls (more important than audio)
• daily number of calls connected
  • This indicates preference of users to recieve audio / video call over whatsapp instead of other platform
  • audio
  • video  (more important than audio)
• number of users blocked & reported for spam  / fake news / fraud etc.
  • now a days, because of fake news, online frauds, bots, robocalling etc. this has become an important way to protect users as well as reduce spam from a platform. 
  • increased activity of block/report shows such agents are increasing on  a platform, which eventually may hurt safey, privacy of users or it may result in fake news spread.