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RunKeeper Steps Up App Performance with Segment

RunKeeper Steps Up App Performance with Segment

More than 30 million people around the world use RunKeeper apps to

keep track of their fitness and stay active. The flagship RunKeeper app

helps people measure their workouts. To keep them moving before and

afterwards, the RunKeeper team created a new app called Breeze that

motivates people throughout the day.

schedule a demo today +1 (415) 213-2870 segment.com / demo

Breeze is a different kind of app for RunKeeper because it tracks movement and

calories passively. Fitness gurus open up the RunKeeper app when they start a

workout, but the Breeze product team had to design and fine tune a system to open

up and start running the app automatically without burning through users’ battery life.

They needed an analytics platform that could help them optimize Breeze’s unique

performance parameters and engage users with helpful notifications.

Challenge

goss nuzzo-jonesSenior Software Engineer at RunKeeper

“When we started building our new app, we needed a flexible analytics architecture that was

easy to maintain. We didn’t want to spend a lot of time instrumenting tracking and individual

SDKs for each analytics, product and marketing tool we needed to use. Instead, Segment takes

care of all of our integrations for us.”

schedule a demo today +1 (415) 213-2870 segment.com / demo

RunKeeper chose Segment as the standard for analytics tracking and product

optimization in Breeze. To track app performance and trigger app opens in the

background, the team created custom analytics events with Segment’s API that hook

into a device’s GPS location, movement, and accelerometer. Few analytics vendors

can track these background events, so Segment helped the team structure and send

this data to tools like Google Analytics and Localytics.

Because the app runs in the background, the Breeze team also needed to encourage

people to open the app and track their progress with push notifications. Using

Segment, RunKeeper experimented with different content, timing and triggers and

tracked what worked best.

Segment is a wrapper SDK for analytics, product, and marketing tools. RunKeeper uses

Segment to collect, translate, and route all of their Breeze app data to different

vendors, so they don’t have to install individual SDKs or wait for app store approval to

try new tools.

Strategy

max freiert

Director of Product Management at RunKeeper

“Segment made it easy for us to track and analyze events our users didn’t directly trigger, like

GPS location changes—something most analytics providers don’t do well. Based on this

information, we were able to cycle through rapid improvements that upped user retention and

limited battery use for our new app. We’re big Segment fans.”

schedule a demo today +1 (415) 213-2870 segment.com / demo

Using Segment as their customer data hub, RunKeeper has been able to test, analyze,

and tweak Breeze’s performance—optimizing how the app opens from rest in order

to save battery life. RunKeeper has also been able to understand how users like to

engage with push notification and improve retention with timely, high quality content.

Moving forward, the RunKeeper team plans to add new categories of integrations,

including marketing automation to engage users and a/b testing to improve

onboarding. Segment makes it easy for the product team to demo and use these tools

—rather than allocating engineering resources, each integration only takes the flip

of a switch.

Results

fareed mosavatVP of Product at RunKeeper

“With Segment, we use one SDK to easily turn on and off all of our integrations and try new

ones. Instead of wasting vendor trials on setup, we can just switch on a tool and see how it

works with our live data. This is a big win for our engineering and product teams.”