How to create a product engagement score

Businesses have a lot of data on how their users behave in their product, but often that data is not organized in a way that makes it accessible. Without the ability to visualize this data at a glance, businesses cannot make quick, data-informed decisions about how engaged their users are.

Ortto’s Scores feature provides this visibility. You can set up scores for product engagement using a set of activities and filters from your CDP, which different teams across the business can use to quickly identify highly engaged or disengaged users. You can then use scores as filters to build audiences or as entry and exit criteria in your journeys and playbooks. Find out more about setting up scores in Ortto’s blog.

What is a product engagement score?

A product engagement score is a way to assess how engaged users are in your product and how they’re using it at a particular time. To ensure recency and relevancy, the score should have a half-life/degrading model (i.e. the time in which the data/action will be half as valuable). 

In Ortto, you can easily filter based on scores in the People section of your CDP.

Why should SaaS companies score product engagement?

A product engagement score can be used by multiple teams across a business:

• Customer support can assess churn risk and identify product inactivity

• Marketing can re-engage dormant users through targeted emails

• The product team can identify strengths and weaknesses in the product and user experience

• Product marketing can identify users who may be open to participating in beta testing or being part of a bug bounty program

• Sales can identify upsell opportunities

Once you have scored users’ product engagement, you can create customer journeys that trigger relevant and timely messages that boost engagement, re-engage dormant users, ask for product feedback, educate about new features, highlight referral programs, and so on.

Journey

Journey builder templates

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How to calculate product engagement

How a business builds a product engagement score will depend on the user activities and behaviors they deem to be most indicative of engagement or disengagement.

For example, a task management SaaS business might include the following activities in their product engagement scoring model:

• Created a task

• Completed a task

• Assigned a task to a colleague

• Invited a colleague to the dashboard

• Logged in/used the app more than 5 times per week

• Watched a how-to video

• Attended product training

• Completed an NPS survey

On the other hand, a fitness and wellness SaaS might build a scoring criteria around the following activities:

• Watched a fitness tutorial all the way through

• Favorited a fitness video

• Downloaded a recipe/resource

• Logged in X amount of times in X time period

• New user signed up using the current user’s referral code

• Upgraded subscription

When building a scoring model, each criteria can hold a different weight. In the case of the task management SaaS, they might decide that ‘completed a task’ indicates greater product engagement than ‘watched a how-to video’. In Ortto, you can add weight to different metrics by giving them a point score – e.g. ‘completed a task’ could be worth 100 points, and ‘watched a how-to video’ could be worth 50 points. Each activity would combine to create an overall engagement score.

Below is how the task management SaaS might score different activities:

• Created a task - 50 points

• Completed a task - 50 points

• Assigned a task to a colleague - 50 points

• Invited a colleague to the dashboard - 100 points

• Logged in/used the app more than 5 times per week – 150 points

• Watched a how-to video - 20 points

• Attended product training - 50 points

• Completed an NPS survey – 20 points

In this example, the activity that shows the most engagement is when the user is actively using the app frequently, followed by inviting a colleague to a dashboard.

You could also set activities with negative scores. For example, an activity such as the user not logging into their account for 30 days would indicate churn and could be worth -100 points. With this insight, customer success can reach out to the disengaged user, marketing can re-engage them through email or SMS, and the product team can optimize areas of the product to ensure optimal user experience.

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Final word

Every SaaS business should score their users based on engagement so they can gain actionable insights on how to improve the product and overall user experience. Try Ortto’s Scores feature for yourself by signing in or signing up today.