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If your onboarding flow is confusing, slow, or asks too many questions, that user, who is already rushing to find a deal, will abandon you for a smoother experience. And during the busiest shopping week of the year, that initial drop-off is magnified tenfold.
The success of your entire Black Friday push ultimately rests on how well your first 90 seconds perform. This is how you use behavioural analytics to diagnose and fix that critical first impression.
How Do You Stop New Users From Quitting Your App in the First Minute?
If Saffas can’t get to your deal fast, they’d rather not deal with you at all. If your process asks for too many sensitive details upfront, or if the product's value isn't immediately clear, they are gone.
You need an analytics platform that captures every click, scroll, and form fill, allowing you to watch the user's journey leading up to the cold feet moment. We use our partner Amplitude for this kind of deep diagnosis because it lets us link the replays directly to specific events. The key is being able to dive deep and filter those replays to see only the sessions where the user actually struggled.
How Does Session Replay Reveal Why Users Are Frustrated?
Session Replay can show you the exact moment of frustration in onboarding that led users to drop off your app.
- Rage Clicks: Did the user click a button repeatedly because it appeared broken or unresponsive? That's immediate evidence of poor UX.
- Confusion: Did the user scroll back and forth between the app's home screen and the sign-up form, suggesting the next step was unclear?
- Technical Errors: Replay often highlights console logs and network errors, letting you pinpoint if a slow page load is what drove the user away.
The ability to move instantly from a Funnel metric to watching the human frustration is how you move from generalised data to confident, actionable fixes.
The Strategic Payoff: Converting Early Insight into Long-Term Retention
We’ve previously spoken about how global brands search for early signs of friction to improve retention and how SA can learn from that. This ties into that, as a user who completes a smooth onboarding journey is a user far more likely to convert during Black Friday and retain thereafter.
By perfecting the first 90 seconds, you can:
- Optimise the Path to Value: Remove unnecessary steps and ensure users reach the core feature of your app quickly, reducing the chance of abandonment.
- Identify True Conversion Drivers: Pinpoint the early behaviours (like searching for a product or viewing a specific guide) that predict a user will stick around. This tells you which parts of your app to highlight in the onboarding flow.
This level of diagnosis allows you to confidently make changes that drive guaranteed, data-backed improvements to your most critical conversion path.
So, What’s Next?
This isn't just about Black Friday; it’s a direct pathway to improving your retention all year round. Black Friday is simply the perfect opportunity to expose where you’re falling short and make the fixes that truly matter.
But if you do wanna know more about Black Friday and why Saffas abandon their carts, we’ve written another blog here.
Ready to learn more about Amplitude? Chat with our team. We’re super keen to help you get set up 👇
