Pirate Metrics: Making Money with Firebase

Over the course of this series, I’ve introduced the concept of Pirate Metrics, followed by individual posts discussing how to track (and improve) acquisition, activation, retention and referral with Firebase and its’ suite of products.

After making a great app experience, you probably turned your attention to making some money with it. And the reason you’re interested in “Pirate Metrics” and Firebase is probably because you want help doing just that. If you put into practice some of our earlier suggestions, you should have already seen an impact on your numbers. We also have some tools specific to revenue that might be of help.

The first is for those of you who have in-app or E-commerce purchases as part of your product. If you connect your Play Store account with Firebase, all your in-app purchases will automatically be tracked for you. For E-commerce purchases, there’s just a simple event that needs to be fired. You can see your collective revenue on your dashboard and also create audiences based on users who made specific purchases.

The benefit of doing this is that you can segregate your paying users from your non-paying ones, see their behavior patterns and focus more specifically on their needs. You can also understand what made them pay and then craft the user experience in a manner to increase the proportion of your paying users.

Additionally, AdMob can now be integrated using the Firebase SDK, allowing you to monetize with a range of ad formats such as banners, interstitials, native and more. You can see your advertising revenue right inside Firebase Analytics, allowing you to understand trends and take action.

For example, if your product gets news coverage in a particular part of the world, you might start seeing strong growth there. In Firebase, you would be able to spot any growth and tweak mediation settings for AdMob to capitalize on it.

As with all other elements, the power of Firebase’s offering with a specific “Pirate Metric” is that the tool is deeply integrated with our analytics platform. This allows you to not only make decisions on what actions need to be taken for growth, but also follow up and determine whether the decision had the intended consequence.

We hope you enjoyed and benefited from this series. For additional information, do visit the official Firebase documentation.