How Venmo increased user engagement by 30%

Venmo, the leader in the mobile payments, is continuously looking for ways to improve its user experience and make paying friends easier and more enjoyable. They rely heavily on the data provided by Venmo’s Head of Data Engineering and Analytics, Joel Witten, and his team to make the right decisions.

Joel’s team faced a few challenges when it came to wrangling their customer data:

• Data silos: They employed multiple tools like Amplitude, S3, Google Analytics and Crashlytics which created silos of data that could only be accessed through unique dashboards
• Data quality: They manually instrumented events across iOS, Android and Web creating a non-uniform implementation which resulted in data inconsistencies and extremely high maintenance cost.
• Redundant engineering cycles: Engineers often had to implement the same events, such as logins and signups, across many different vendors.
• Sluggish SDKs: Having the same events logged multiple times also increased the size of the app and made it slower than necessary.

Venmo turned to mParticle to help them overcome these pain points and more.

Centralized Data Collection & Unified Customer Profiles

mParticle now collects 3.6B data points per month from Venmo’s iOS, Android and web properties as well as server-side payment events. These data points are then merged into unique customer profiles to reduce data duplication and redundancy. Using mParticle to track logged-in and anonymous users across web and app and tying this together with multi-channel touchpoint data allowed Joel’s team to gain a deeper understanding of the growth funnel and gave a more complete understanding of the user journey and preferences. For example, using these insights they discovered that altering the feed UI would lead to increased engagement.

Automated Data Connections & Reduced Vendor Costs

Using mParticle’s automatic data pipeline, Joel and his team were able to easily onboard complex unified profiles to Amplitude and S3 with a few clicks. Sending unified profiles to vendors such as Redshift for further analysis rather than manually implementing raw event data significantly reduced raw data costs for Venmo.

Greater Data Transparency

Using the live stream report, Venmo is able to see exactly how much data is being collected – broken down by each event and exactly how much of each event was collected and sent to each vendor making it easier for Joel’s team to QA what’s happening in real-time.

Improved App Performance

As an added benefit, by using mParticle’s SDK to collect data once and connect it to multiple services, Venmo was able to consolidate vendor SDKs resulting in faster app performance, reduced battery consumption and fewer bugs.