What is product adoption?
Product adoption or user adoption is the process of a customer or potential customer starting to use your product or feature to achieve the goal it was designed to solve. It essentially describes the state of a user having "adopted" your product as a solution to their problem or as a way to achieve their goal. Product adoption is most often illustrated as a percentage of users who have used a set of features or performed a series of actions with your product. The features and actions that describe adoption for your product are typically defined by the product team based on the type of product you have.
If you're familiar with the Pirate Metrics (AARRR framework), product adoption lines up with the activation and retention metrics that show if users are active and with your product and remain that way. Measuring product adoption is a great way to understand your product's ongoing or long-term success, because it shows how useful and sticky your product is.
How to measure product adoption
One of the first steps to measuring product adoption is to outline the criteria that signal when it's occurred. What key actions or behaviors are indicating that customers are using your product to solve their problems? A quick and dirty way of identifying the criteria for product adoption is by identifying which actions users are taking to achieve the goals your product was designed to deliver on.
It's important to note that customers should be continually returning to your product to solve their problem. Relating product adoption back to the features and experiences that influence higher retention is critical to product success.
Useful product adoption metrics
Daily/Monthly Active Users: Daily and monthly active users metrics are used to measure the activity of your users based on a specific timeframe. These can be displayed as a count or as a percentage.
150,000 users in last 30 days / 500,000 total users x 100 = 30% monthly active users
User Adoption Rate: A metric that determines how many new vs. total users you have in a given period (new users / total users x 100). If that period is the month of August, you simply count the number of new users from August 1 to August 31, then divide that by your total number of users on August 31.
15,000 new users / 145,000 total users * 100 = 10.3% user adoption rate
Feature Adoption Rate: This is similar to the user adoption rate, but you're measuring users of a new feature instead of the overall product (feature users / total users x 100). This is commonly used to measure the adoption of new features and give product teams a sense of how useful that feature is.
600 users of a new feature / 1,500 total users x 100 = 40% feature adoption rate
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