How to Segment Audiences and Target Mobile App Surveys With Instabug

Would you like to understand more about why your mobile app users do what they do? Or perhaps know which people are more likely to make purchases? Would it be helpful to be able to send surveys and collect thoughts and ideas from the users that matter most? Of course! Here's where learning how to segment audiences and target mobile surveys comes in handy.

Segmentation allows you to collect targeted insights about certain groups of users. You can also categorize your app’s users in order to look for patterns of behavior and shared traits within groups.

Once you’ve set some custom attribute and event tags, you can even use them to set custom rules from your dashboard. In this post, we’ll teach you how to segment users and target mobile app surveys with Instabug. We’ll also give you some examples for inspiration, and then you can develop your own metrics and goals specific to your needs.

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A use case in segmentation and targeted mobile app surveys

One of Instabug’s longtime users (let’s call them Spark) provides us with a great use case in segmentation. This large social media platform offers premium membership as an in-app purchase. Their premium users are outnumbered by the free, but those paid accounts comprise a significant portion of their income stream.

The Spark team wanted to know how they were doing with this group of people. Did they feel that the subscription price was worth it? And which new features were paying users most interested in seeing in upcoming versions?

They used Instabug’s custom attribute tags to make it happen. First, the Spark team assigned a “Premium User” attribute to all paying users. Then when it came time to survey them, the rest was easy. The product manager wrote an NPS survey, followed by a question about the features they’d like to see. In the survey targeting section, he selected that he wanted to show the survey only to users with the “Premium User” tag.

And that’s it! Segmentation allowed Spark to get input from a specifically valued segment so they could weigh their opinions accordingly.

You can use the same procedure to ask basically any group of users anything you want. You can assign tags for characteristics or tags for events. Maybe you want to reach out to users who’ve reduced how often they log in. Maybe your UX team has questions for heavy users of a particular feature. If you can dream it up, Instabug can help you make it happen.

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How to segment users with Instabug

Segmenting your users is simple. You’ll create custom tags to describe specific user attributes or events that have occurred in the application. For example, you might find it convenient to label users from a certain age group or separate paying users from non-paying users. As for events, these could include completing a task, making a purchase, or using a feature.

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Setting user attributes

Assigning attribute tags to your user profiles is simple and will require just a minute of your time. In our docs, you’ll find detailed guides to setting attributes on iOS and Android. Once set, tags will appear in user profiles, so you’ll see important details at a glance.

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When you’re looking at bug reports, you can filter by all kinds of categories, including user attributes (some others include priority, app version, categories, integrations, status, etc.). This will help you narrow down what you’re looking for.

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Setting custom events

Instabug lets you add custom event tags to your bug and crash reports. The process for setting this up is similar to setting user attributes. Here are the guidelines for iOS and Android. Once you’ve added some event tags, you can use them to create rules. You’ll use your rules to create specially-targeted surveys so you can zero in on your goals.

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Creating super-targeted surveys with Instabug

There are a few ingredients to successful surveys: length (or lack thereof!), timeliness, and relevance. You want your surveys to ask short, direct questions to the right people at the right time. We have a guide that will help you make sure you’re asking the right questions. First you'll segment your audience and then target your mobile app survey. Instabug’s targeting features allow you to direct your surveys to specific audiences at strategic moments.

When you create a survey with Instabug, you’ll start with writing your questions, or choosing from our templates. Once you’ve done that, you’ll get to the targeting step. You’re going to set a rule for who sees this survey. Setting rules has three parts: WHO you’re targeting, WHEN they should be surveyed, and the FREQUENCY with which they see the survey.

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Step one: Who

Which of your users should see this survey? If you don’t want all of your users to see it by default, add a condition. You can choose from preset attributes like app version, session count, last seen, country, or more, or you can select the custom variables you created earlier. You can select multiple conditions if you’d like this particular survey to be seen by more than one segment.

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Step two: When

When should your users see this survey? By default, your survey will be shown 10 seconds after your user’s session begins. But if you want the survey to be triggered by a specific event, here’s where you’ll make that happen. Examples of custom events you might choose could be:

• Makes a purchase
• Chats with another user
• Passes a level
• Completes a task

There are many reasons why you might want to choose an event-based survey. For instance, Tinder will ask you to rate the app just after you’ve made a match. Why then? This is a point in time when the user is likely feeling good about themselves. It’s an emotional high for the user, which makes it a great time for Tinder to ask you to rate it in the app store; when you’re feeling good, you’re more likely to give it a positive review. It’s simple psychology, combined with a framework that allows you to make it happen.

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Step three: Freq

How often should your users see this survey? Select how many times you want your users to see it. You can show it to users only once, or choose a limit per number of days. If they dismiss it twice, they won’t see it again, because we don’t want to annoy them.

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Segmentation and survey ideas

Now that you know how to use Instabug’s segmentation features and how to target a mobile app survey, here are a few examples of the things you can do with them. Survey questions and audiences should always be tailored to your own goals, but you can use these for inspiration.

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