Just short of reaching its first birthday, Shopkick has reached the 2 million user milestone. The company emphasizes these are active users, in response to recent industry outcry (and comments by Mark Zuckerberg yesterday) that measuring registered users is irrelevant.
The growth curve is picking up for Shopkick, passing this milestone just four months after hitting its first million users. The company points to a few drivers for its geographic growth in an email sent today.
– Best Buy, Crate & Barrel and west elm now offer shopkick’s walk-in rewards at ALL locations nationwide
– Other partners have significantly increased the deployment of shopkick throughout their footprint
– Recently, shopkick became available to local stores too. Interested stores in 10 markets can go to www.shopkick.com/local to learn more and apply
– Brand partnerships are on the rise: expect to hear more about how some Fortune 500 companies are using shopkick to connect with shoppers browsing on the couch all the way to the cash register
The third bullet is one we just wrote about and will be a topic of conversation at our Deals 3D conference coming up in two weeks. We’ll be featuring Shopkick VP of Product Evan Tana. Hope to see you there.
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Measuring the number of users isn’t irrelevant, so long as you can understand the impact of those numbers. Ultimately, the goal is to boost sales; while everyone touts engagement and brand advocacy, businesses are still in it to make sales. Same thing goes for a physical location — you can have hundreds to thousands walk through the doors on a daily/monthly basis, but if no one buys you’re not going to stay in business. Getting registered users is the first step; the next step is to encite them to take action…and then measure that action.
Good point. Irrelevant was a strong word. What i meant was that the barrier is so low to download free apps so measuring those who do so isn’t a good measure of success.
My iphone has over 100 apps and I use maybe 7 on a regular basis. In this environment “active users” needs to replace “users” as the metric that is paraded around in press releases and other company marketing that they’ve reached user milestones.
Number of downloads or registered users means a lot less in this environment when apps are downloaded so easily then just languish on home screens(see that famous Flurry study everyone always points to about declining app usage over time).
It applies to other areas as well. Myspace for the past few years has been using registered users as a public metric. Most of those users had defected to Facebook but still kept their myspace profiles in tact – thus still counted as registered users. In social, session lengths and page views is a better metric. In the mobile app world, it’s got to be something other than app downloads
But you’re right that all of this pales to the ultimate metric which is conversions. I don’t disagree there; location awareness, deals, payments, and all the stuff we’ve been harping about is all about conversion metrics.