Metrics Deep-Dive for Product Managers
By: Abhishek Chakravarty
Tags: Startup, Marketing, Product Management, Metrics

Metrics Deep-Dive for Product Managers

Measure & Track the Entire Path to Market for your Product

Photo by Jungwoo Hong

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Last week, I wrote a post about why having an End-to-End Analytics Strategy for your Product is so important to drive successful outcomes. If you missed that post, you can read it here.

Now having an analytics strategy is one thing, but the ‘execution’ is where the rubber meets the road. The two key questions before you can implement your strategy are

What metrics do you want to measure at each stage of your product’s Go-To-Market plan?

Given the metrics you chose — How to set things up and what tools you’ll need?

The rule of thumb is this — your Metrics must be meaningful given the context. They must be set up so that they tell you a story of whatever it is that you want to measure.

In this post, let’s pick a product and walk through an example scenario for what Metrics make sense to measure. Let’s take a look at the Go-To-Market plan and the different stages of the customer acquisition path for a product and understand the metrics in context.

“Smart Locks” Co.

Imagine your product is a smart lock system that helps people lock /unlock doors through their phones. It has a Wi-Fi-enabled lock hardware + a mobile app to control the lock via your phone.

Now let’s say that you have an online-only Go-To-Market path — which means you have a website where people can buy these locks from, and you have an amazon product listing as well.

Once people buy the lock they can download an iOS/Android app from the app store for FREE.

Here’s what a common Customer Acquisition path for this product might look like

People search for “Smart Lock/ Wi-fi Locks” on Google They click your ad and land on your website’s Landing page to check out your product If they are sold on your product, they purchase it right away or convert to become your customers — good for you! If they are interested but iffy or are just checking out different options — they may simply bounce off of your website and/or provide you with their email address to learn more about the product, wait for promotions, deals, etc. The vast majority of the people that land on your website will follow this step.

For each of these steps, you need solid data on how things are looking and where the frictions are. You need to establish goals — what does success looks like for each step and then define metrics that are most important to hit those goals.

Measuring what matters at each step

Let’s look at key metrics for each step of your customer acquisition plan for Smart Locks.

**A word of caution before we proceed though — before setting up metrics and tracking visitors please make sure you properly understand, acknowledge, and implement user data collection policies and consent requirements. Most countries have regulations on how user data may be collected, stored, and processed. As a rule of thumb, only collect data that is absolutely important and get the user’s consent before doing so.**

Alright, here we go

#1. Landing Page Metrics

When a visitor first lands onto your marketing website or landing page, they may be arriving at your page from many different sources. There are several important things you’d want to know about your landing pages and who is visiting them, but here are the bare minimum that we must track

How many people are visiting your landing page? (landing page views)

Where are these visitors coming from? (Source)

Which pages do people spend the most time on?

How many visitors actually convert ( hit that “Call to Action” button )?

How many people did nothing/ bounced despite visiting your landing page? and why? (bounce rate)

How many people hit your call to action button leaving you with additional information (e.g. email?)

“Call to Action” (CTA) is where it all starts

Your landing page will have a “Call to Action” Form where you’ll want your visitors to take a specific action say, “Send me deals & offers” in exchange for some basic info, a Name, and/or an Email at the minimum. Here’s an example from another Smart Lock maker.

As soon as a visitor to your website gives you an email, they become a Lead in your system that has the potential to convert a paying customer. So, From a pure analytics standpoint, the Call to Action form is the gateway to your Lead Funnel. Once you capture a lead in your lead funnel, your analytics focus will shift to measuring a different set of metrics.

These are metrics that’ll act as a report card for your sales and marketing efforts and they’ll ground you on what areas need to be worked upon, and those that are maximizing ROI. Let’s look at them next.

#2. Lead Funnel Metrics

At this point, your customer acquisition funnel has people in it that it seems like are interested in buying a smartwatch — and you need to market your product to these folks. So what do you do?

You design and deploy marketing campaigns — Email Marketing, Retargeting, Remarketing campaigns — and for each campaign, you can measure how these folks are responding to your promotions.

Ultimately, your lead’s engagement patterns and the specific actions they take will tell you how likely they are to become a paying customer. This brings us to Lead Funnel Metrics.

Say you are running an email campaign where you send periodic offers and deals as well as content about how great your smart locks are: To see if people are engaging with your emails you’ll probably care about some of the following metrics

How many people open your emails? (Open rate)

How many people clicked on the links in your email(Click Through Rates)

How many people that received an email — with a call to action — went ahead and did what you wanted them to do (make a purchase, upgrade to the premium tier, etc. )? (Conversion Rates)

How many emails were not delivered? (Bounce Rates)

Here’s a great link for which metrics to track if you are running an email campaign.

You are going to use these metrics to measure the effectiveness of your marketing and advertising campaigns. Again the exact metrics you’ll care about will be based upon the kind of marketing campaign you are running and your product itself — but you get the drift.

#3. Conversion Metrics

As your marketing campaigns qualify leads and move them down the Funnel stages, you’ll measure and capture your conversion metrics — to give you a sense of how your leads are progressing through the funnel. The goal is to make sure that your leads are getting closer to a purchase decision.

Here are a few important questions that your metrics must answer:

How many ‘raw’ leads convert to “Marketing Qualified Leads”?

How many Marketing Qualified Leads Convert to “Sales Qualified Leads”?

How many “Sales Qualified Leads” convert to paying customers?

What’s the Average time spent between each of the above conversion events?

How long is the overall Sales Cycle — from lead to a paying customer?

What is your total cost of customer acquisition?

What marketing campaigns are driving conversions, which ones aren’t?

For people that convert, how did they first arrive at our landing page (source)?

#4. Usage & Customer Experience Metrics

Let’s say you just successfully converted a lead into a customer and they bought your Smart Lock from Amazon. Next, they download a free app, create an account, and start using your product! Getting this far is a big deal, but the job ain’t over yet.

“Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.” — Walt Disney

At this point, you need to make sure users are having an amazing experience with your product. The goal is to maximize customer retention and drive repeat usage and purchases. You want them to have a great onboarding experience. Maybe you have some premium features in the app that you want them to purchase.

But above all, once somebody is a customer, You’ll want to make them look like superstars for using your product. You want to turn them into marketers for your product so they tell others how great your product is. There is nothing stronger than word of mouth marketing. A paying customer is sacred and you cannot afford to lose them. So what are you going to measure that helps you keep them?

What you will measure is largely going to depend upon your specific product and the business goals that you want to hit. Here are a few things you’ll want to track for our smart lock example

How many amazon/app store reviews does the product have?

what’s the ratio of 5-star reviews to the total reviews?

What are the “Product Returns” ratios like?

What’s the NPS score for this product?

How often is the product used?

What are the top features that users engage with?

What do your user segments look like? Who are your power users? Who are the ones that sparingly use it?

What are the leading indicators that a user/customer is not having a great time with your product?

These metrics are akin to the diagnostics data from onboard a rocketship that can help you guide it to orbit.

Instrumenting your Metrics

Now that you’ve defined all the metrics across all stages of the entire customer acquisition path — next comes the implementation phase — i.e. instrumenting the metrics into your product Choosing what tools to use is a key decision that requires some thought based on features, available resources, and even your customer acquisition channels (offline/online), etc. In the next post, I’ll dive deeper and look at the tools available to help instrument these metrics as well as some common pitfalls to watch out for.

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