State of Dynamic App Experiences 2024

About this report

Dynamic app experiences refer to the UI/UX elements used in an app with the purpose of educating and guiding users, and encouraging them to take actions that drive user and business value.

In the last few years, we've seen increased interest in this space amongst B2C apps. This is our first report, to answer common questions we heard from our customers.

We looked at 1,000+ experiences built on our platform to understand what top-performing experiences had in common.

Data overview

We collected firmographic and usage data, aggregated and anonymized it. The data set comprised of:

• 75+ mobile apps
• 1,000+ experiences
• 100M+ MAUs

We chose apps from various industries with MAUs ranging from <100k to >5M.

Industry breakdown

Fintech apps represent ~32% of our dataset, followed closely by media & entertainment (28%) and ecommerce (21%).

MAU-size breakdown

Apps with 500k-1M MAUs (36%) constitute the largest segment of our data, followed by those with 1M-5M MAUs (29%).

Why are dynamic experiences gaining importance?

Saturation of traditional channels

Over the last decade, B2C companies have used push notifications, SMS and emails to bring users back to their apps. But now, with every app resorting to these channels, they’ve become overly saturated.

An average consumer receives 46 push notifications/day. Consumers are bombarded with marketing messages and the effectiveness of these channels has nosedived in the last decade.

Growth of super apps

A super app is a mobile application that combines multiple services into one platform. This creates two challenges:

• Complex onboarding: With the increasing number of features and services, it is more likely that new users can feel lost when trying out an app for the first few times
• Habit formation: Users get familiar with a section of the app, and hardly bother to check out newer offerings

Performance vs other channels 

CTRs compared to push, SMS and email

Typical CTRs for dynamic experiences like floaters, walkthroughs, and media elements like bottom sheets and PiP videos are ~20%, followed by a 5% CTR of push notifications.

How popular are dynamic experiences today?

Avg # of live experiences by MAU size

Higher MAUs correspond to more live campaigns on average. This is likely because larger apps have higher number of user cohorts for experimentation.

What are the most common use cases?

Use case split

Apps create the most experiences for "feature adoption & cross-sell" (39%) and "onboarding" (31%), followed  by "quick experimentation" (16%) and "ARPU/LTV increase" (14%).

As developer bandwidth is always scarce, we expect more teams to start experimenting more - testing hypothesis, design and content.

Which "experiences" are most used by industry?

We took some time to understand the most used experiences across the top 3 industries in our data set - Financial Services, Media & Entertainment and eCommerce & Retail.

Financial services

Fintech companies typically have multiple services offered to users. It becomes essential to use widgets, stories and walkthroughs.

Media & entertainment

Streaks are popular amongst gaming and content-related companies, followed closely by widgets.

Ecommerce

Stories, recommendation grids and floaters do well in ecommerce. This is likely due to their non-intrusive nature, helping ecommerce apps increase cart conversions and AOV.

How do I build dynamic app experiences?

• Ensure experiences render in near real-time (100ms lag between an event trigger and experience showing up).
• Design experiences to match your brand guidelines to give users a native feel.
• Ensure you can analyze data easily and iterate quickly - the first experience you build may not be the best one for your users.

Traits of high performing experiences

Best ways to use Stories

"Value prop communication" (45.4%) followed by "Showcasing new deals" (22.6%) seem to be the dominant ways that Stories are used today.

Conversion data for Stories by # of slides

1-3 slides per story are ideal to drive conversions on goal metrics. Conversion numbers drop quite a bit if a Story has 4 or more slides.

Conversion on goals vs # of steps in a walkthrough

3-step walkthroughs have the highest conversion rate on goal events at ~12%.