Understanding Acquisition Metrics
The first two metrics to look at are typically visits and views
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Visits: The number of unique visitors to your website in a given period
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Views: The number of total pageviews that occured on your site in a given period. Ie. if one visitor clicks through to 5 pages, that will count as 5 views.
It’s often helpful to look at a Views/Visits ratio to understand how engaged unique visitors are with your content. If you have a high Views/Visit ratio, it means that visitors, on average, are engaged with what content you have produced and are intrigued and able to navigate from page to page.
After understanding general engagement and audience count, it’s important to breakdown where your audience is coming from. For that we’ll look at traffic broken down by device, source, and location.
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Traffic by Device: Are people visiting our site from mobile, desktop, tablet, etc?
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Traffic by Source: What channels are we effectively attracting traffic from? Social? Referral links? Email?
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Traffic by Location: Where in the world do our visitors come from?
Understanding these traffic demographics will help you to hone messaging and optimize certain channels over others. For example, if you see that almost no traffic comes from mobile, you might not want to worry too much about optimizing your website for mobile in the early days. Conversely, if you have a consumer-facing model and see that you’re getting a majority of your visits from mobile, you need to make sure the site looks great and is easy to navigate from popular phones.
After you have a good idea of who your audience is, it’s time to optimize how you convert them to users and customers.
Understanding Activation Metrics
Attracting the right audience for your product is imperative. So is clear messaging. It’s hard enough to build something people love, so once you’ve landed on a concept that people want, you need to be remove as many barriers for a visitor to say “yes, I want this” as possible. This means crystal clear messaging on what you do and how the user can get involved. A few metrics to track:
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Visits/Lead Conversion: What percentage of our visitors are performing a desired action like email signup, white paper download, or a purchase?
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Conversion funnel: What steps are taken by a visitor to complete a conversion goal? What are sticking points for people? Are visitors clicking on “sign up” but falling off during registration? How can we improve that process?
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Conversions by campaign: Which of our marketing campaigns is producing the highest conversions? Is email proving more effective than Google ads? What do we do to grow our email subscribers?
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Conversions by page: Do certain pages drive more conversions than others? How do we drive more traffic to those pages? How do we use similar messaging or ideas across the rest of our website?
So now we have folks raising their hands to say they want what we’re selling, how do we optimize for real, paying customers?
Understanding Revenue Metrics
Especially in businesses that require some personal touch before converting leads to customers, you’ll need to track certain metrics to measure the efficacy of this process across your organization, but also on an individual level.
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Lead/Trial Conversion: What percentage of our leads are we converting to sales? Are certain messages or approaches better at converting to sales than others?
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Time from First Contact to Sale: From the first time we connected with this person, how long did it take them to pay us? What is our sales cycle? If our contract value is low, this needs to be fast. If we are selling large contracts, we can afford to take our time here.
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Customer demographics: What demographic or type of people are converting to the best customers? What types of accounts close faster? What types pay the most money?
Being Data-Driven vs. Paralysis by Analysis
These are just a few metrics that are helpful for validating your business concept in the early days, but there are many others that might be more specific to your niche. It’s also important to note that you can go too far with data analysis. Especially while you only have a few visits, users, and customers, you need to stay conscious of what is statistically relevant or not.
At the early stages the numbers that should influence your decisions will be reasonably dramatic. Don’t make major product decisions after single-digit percentage points of people act a certain way, and make sure you’re aware of all possible variables that might lead to an outcome. For example, if an email doesn’t perform well, a number of factors can be to blame like subject line, messaging, length of message, time of day sent, demographic sent, reason for sending, etc.
While these metrics will be incredibly helpful to understanding if what you’ve built is what people want, it’s vitally important to balance this with talking to your customers mixing in a subjective opinion with the objective data you collect.
