Good Analytics Change Behaviour
You may open up your bank account dashboard and see you have a $1 million dollars in your account. That’s cool. But that doesn’t tell you how to make a $1 million dollars.
Opening up your analytics dashboard and viewing the current number of account customers is equally useless. That doesn’t provide insight on how to drive the business.
There are 4 reasons to add analytics:
1) Business Goals
Discover your engine of growth.
Figure out where customers are coming from. Are they organically showing up on the App Store page? Are installs being bought from Facebook? Are they showing up because of a PR campaign? Is Site A or Site B a better source of customers?
These are the types of questions that analytics should be answering.
Measure business metrics. Make sure that customer acquisition cost is being calculated.
How much did it cost to acquire a particular customer? Where did the customer come from? Was it “free” like from a blog post on a site? How much did that blog post cost to write? Can that channel be scaled up?
Measure average revenue per user (ARPU) & lifetime value (LTV) of a customer by channel.
How long does it take for a customer to spend the first dollar? Are customers from a certain source better customers than customers from other sources? How long until they churn?
2) Product Goals
Use analytics that point to a number that shows customers like this product.
This number should be a leading indicator to revenue. This number should be a ratio. This number should help the team change something in the App to drive revenue up.
This is done by measuring the ratio of users that make it through a funnel. There are 3 general funnel types in an app:
- Signup: the ratio of users that download the App that successfully make it through signup and create a profile
- Consumption: the ratio of users that consume a particle type of content
- Creation: the ratio of users that take a particular action
These should all be broken out into 7-day-active and 30-day-active stats.
3) Customer Support
Message customers that are having problems with the app.
Customers that are no longer active can be segmented. Do qualitative interviews and figure out why they stopped using the App. Build features and re-engagement campaigns to get customers back into the app based on this feedback.
4) Errors and Diagnostics
Does an API that the app depends on change? Did the Facebook API break? Is the server slow for clients in different parts of the world?
Analytics should be used to diagnose these situations.