Pirate metrics — acquisition (part 2 of 7)
Tags: Sales, Acquisition, Startup, Pirate Metrics

This article is a part of a series about pirate metrics.

Acquisition is the first metric in the AARRR framework, and arguably the most important one. It helps to understand how users find you and how many of them become your clients.

While having your product be found by users, the crucial part is conversion. This process happens when a person who visits your website, or app store, makes a purchase or a download.

This seems straightforward and in many ways it is. But along the way many micro conversions happen along the way — and it’s vital to understand and measure them.

Which micro conversion to measure?

The list of micro conversions can be very long and diverse, depending on the nature of the product or service. For example Hotjar provides a sample 10-step list of micro conversions for an online store:

Visit the website View the category pages View a sub-category page View an individual product page Add to the product to your shopping cart Proceed to checkout Enter your delivery address Select shipping Enter your payment information Place the order

Alltogether these micro conversions draw a picture of what a potential customer journey may look like. A drop-off (lack of micro conversion) on any stage causes the journey to be broken and means the customer is potentially lost.

Therefore measuring the percentage of micro conversions and drop-offs always draws a very interesting picture of which area should be improved. If, for example, there is low level of micro conversion between proceeding to check out and entering delivery address — it may mean that the form is too complex, does not load fast enough, or there are problems with the postal code format.

Similarly, a customer journey for a SaaS product may consist of similar micro-conversions:

Visit website -> View video tutorial -> Visit plans page -> Choose free trial -> Create account -> Select payment method -> Place the order

Ok, but how to attract users to the website in the first place?

While the above customer journeys give an indication of how to measure the actual conversions that become a part of the acquisition metric, it is necessary to attract clients to the website or app store before we can start converting them to customers.

There are dozens of methods to do that and unless you have an unlimited budget, you have to choose a few of them and see how perform.

Rather than choosing randomly, you may use The Bullseye Framework. Proposed by Gabriel Weinberg, founder of DuckDuckGo and author of Traction, the framework provides a list of potential 19 channels of client acquisition and a method of experimenting with them to get the best results.

Experimenting with acquisition channels means trying them out one by one and narrowing them down to a short list of those that really wir

In short, you should brainstorm every channel, choose one or a couple of them to test their success, measure the efficiency and decide whether to scale it up or move on to the next one. The channel that will work in your specific case will depend on your product or service, the stage of maturity, your budget, etc. It is important however to gather data and make sure you don’t miss the moment the sales go through the roof.

Questions to ask yourself about acquisition

What channel drives the most traffic? What channel drives the most traffic that converts people to users? What channel is the most cost effective? What is the list of micro conversions and how they constitute a customer journey? Where do the drop offs happen and why?