10% Conversion Optimization with A/B-Tests

About Genius Scan

Our headline is "Genius Scan: A Document Scanner in Your Pocket." This powerful tool enables you to photograph a document, detect and cleanly crop it, even in the face of distortion. The app then applies smart filters to enhance its quality, giving your documents a professional look. If your document spans multiple pages, they are conveniently bundled into a single PDF. All these processes are automatic and swift. The app also provides what you need for easy document sorting and sharing.

Everyone needs a scanner at home or in the office. Even if it’s not used daily, there will always be times when it’s needed. Having a scanner conveniently available in your pocket makes life easier. Some categories of customers, however, tend to be heavier users of the app. Some examples of interesting customer groups for us are people who travel frequently and need to report expenses, real estate agents who handle a lot of paperwork, and students who scan notes or whiteboards regularly.

We have more than 5M MAU across platforms and more than 50M downloads. Genius Scan has been around since 2010, so we will celebrate our 15th anniversary in 2025!

App analytics are crucial for our business model

We are proud to offer a generous free plan that allows users to experience the full functionality of the app without watermarks on scans. Our business model is simple: users can purchase an upgrade to access advanced features or store documents in the cloud.

Due to this business model, it is extremely important for us to understand which features lead our customers to upgrade to a paid plan. We can then focus on improving the user experience of these features, making them most discoverable to demonstrate the value of our premium offering without shoving a paywall in their faces as many apps do.

To do this, we use TelemetryDeck's funnel analytics and look at some key events. Thanks to the usage data collected by TelemetryDeck, we were able to better understand the conversions to our premium plans. We've been able to run a lot of small A/B-tests where we could increase the conversion by 10% (or avoid hurting the conversion), so that's already very helpful.

Our strategic decisions when selecting the analytics solution

We used to rely on Firebase Analytics—everyone does; it's the free option. But we grew uneasy because, you know, when it's free, YOU (or even worse, your customers) are the product.

As a team, we have always been concerned about protecting privacy and attracting attention. For us, the two are connected. This is the attention economy in times of ad-financed business models: Your privacy is invaded to get more of your attention and sell you more things you don't need. We do not support this model and even decided a few years ago to completely remove advertising from our apps.So, we decided to switch to a paid analytics solution that offered better privacy. We did the same for crash analytics. When we reviewed the options, we quickly learned that paid analytics solutions are crazy expensive, especially when you take into consideration that you have a lot of free users like we do. So, we had to find a privacy-conscious, reliable, and reasonably priced solution. That's how we settled on TelemetryDeck.

We were pleased to find an up-and-coming company and have a direct relationship with the team. We recommend the solution to all small businesses, and those with a large number of free users, which makes them unfit for Mixpanel, Amplitude, and such.

Onboarding TelemetryDeck

The onboarding was super easy. We had analytics fairly abstracted in our apps, so it was just a matter of rewriting one file.

We found out about TelemetryDeck through the iOS developer community on Twitter a long time ago, when it launched. We later learned that we are among the first customers of TelemetryDeck which feels kind of special 🧡