What is Product Adoption? How to Increase Adoption Efficiently

Written by Indicative Team

Product adoption is the key to reaching nearly every business goal. Reducing churn, increasing revenue, upgrading customers… they all rely on how well you get users to fully adopt your product.

Here, we cover:

What product adoption is
How to measure it
How to increase it

What Is Product Adoption?

Product adoption refers to the process customers go through to become aware of your product, find the value in it, and become regular users.

It’s a simple concept, but “adoption” looks different for every organization. Measuring it comes down to how you define adoption for your product.

Take Instagram for example: the company may consider users who download the app, signup, and begin posting to have adopted the app. They may also consider liking or commenting on someone else’s post as adoption. Or, they may not consider a user to have adopted the product until their third post.

Users have to take action to fully adopt a product, and value is what drives them to do that. Adoption happens when a user has their “Aha!” moment and the value of your product “clicks” into place for them.

Product Adoption and Product Analytics

Improving product adoption means helping more users reach that “Aha!” moment. To do that, you need a way to track, measure, and analyze user behavior within your product.

That’s where Product Analytics comes in, allowing you to deeply understand your users and how they behave inside your app.

For example: If adoption means converting from a free to a paid subscription, you need to know how people who convert to paid behave, and how those who never do behave.

With Product Analytics, they can answer those questions quickly—helping further define what adoption looks like for them and uncovering behaviors and feature usage that correlate with high adoption.

What Is the Product Adoption Curve?

The “product adoption curve” is a visual that conceptualizes how and when different segments of the market adopt new products.

When your product is brand new to market, customers who adopt it have different motivations and expectations than the users you’ll have once you establish the product.

The adoption curve visualizes each type of user as your product matures. There are 5 stages:

Innovators: This segment is small but important for new businesses. Your first customers, they’re excited by new technology and will deal with some bugs and hiccups to access it.
Early adopters: Motivated by a strong need for your product—rather than desire for all new tech—they’re more interested in innovation than novelty.
Early majority: Early and late majorities like established products. Developing a strong relationship with the first two segments is key because they can convince the majorities to give you a shot.
Late majority: More risk-averse, they take longer to jump on board because they’re looking for established, mature, and bug-free products.
Laggards: This last group really doesn’t like change. They prefer familiar products, only changing when necessary.

How Do You Measure Product Adoption?

There are several key product adoption metrics you can use. The trick to really understanding what adoption looks like for your product is to use a mixture of them to build a well-rounded view:

Who fully adopts the product? What percentage of your user base is fully adopted? What behaviors or characteristics do they have in common?
What features do they adopt? What are their use cases for the product?
When in the customer lifecycle do users fully adopt the product?
How did they get to adoption? What steps did they take?

By analyzing each angle, you can gain better insight into adoption and, crucially, how you can encourage more users to adopt, faster.

What Are the Best Metrics to Track?

Approaching product adoption requires a mix of specific metrics, including software and app-based adoption metrics and customer adoption ones.

Software and app adoption metrics

The most important adoption metric to track is active users. Depending on your product, that may be monthly active users (MAU), weekly active users (WAU), or daily active users (DAU).

Customer adoption metrics

Let's highlight the four most important customer metrics for measuring adoption:

Adoption rate

Your adoption rate is the foundational measure of adoption—it tells you how many of your users are regular active users, opening the door to further analysis.

Conversion rate

The conversion rate is the percentage of total visitors who convert. This can be measured for website visitors who convert to customers or how many free users convert to paid.

Time to value

Time to value (TTV) measures how much time passes between a customer’s first usage of your product and their “Aha!” moment.

Usage frequency

Usage frequency is the percentage of your total user base that regularly uses your product. It can be calculated across the whole product or for specific features.

How to Manage Churn via Retention Analysis

Users who fully adopt your product are far less likely to churn, so monitoring product adoption is a proactive way to reduce churn. This can be achieved by looking at both adoption and retention metrics.

How to Increase the Rate of Product Adoption?

Driving adoption is about making the process as effortless as possible for users, then nudging them further along the path to adoption.

How to Drive User Adoption

Build for adoption from day one by making your product as simple and easy-to-use as possible.
Target more of your best customers by doubling down on the channels and campaigns that convert them.
Use what you’ve learned about adoption to improve onboarding so users can accelerate their usage.

How to Improve Your Onboarding Experience

Use contextual onboarding to guide users through the onboarding flow from within the product.
Focus your onboarding on driving users to the activation point.
Solicit user feedback on how you can improve your onboarding flow.

How to Improve Product Support

Investing in support early on can help you get more users to adopt quickly.

How to Use Data to Improve Your Product

When you measure product adoption using Product Analytics, you have a lot of data to help improve your product and adoption rate.

Ideal Tools From Your Stack That Help

Data is core in measuring and increasing adoption, so having the right tools is crucial:

Your Data Stack: Includes Ingestion, Storage, and Analytics layers.
Onboarding tools: Solutions include Userflow and Appcues.
Support Tools: Top solutions include Zendesk and Intercom.

How Prezi Improves Adoption With Product Analytics

When Prezi launched a new product, they used Product Analytics to facilitate quick adoption among users, measuring user flows and fixing points of friction that slowed down adoption.

Product Analytics to Power Your Product Adoption

Check out our public demo to start increasing your product adoption today.