Three product metrics to track from the start

by Thais Gonzalez

Everyone knows integrating product analytics is vital to long-term success, but there is an overwhelming amount of data and tools available to track it. When you’re just starting out, how do you know what is worth investing time in tracking? Below are three product metrics that every startup should track from the start:

1. Acquisition - how many users are downloading your app? Even better, where are the users that are downloading your product coming from? This is critically important if you are investing in social media ads and other marketing campaigns in order to understand if that investment is paying off. Also, understanding your acquisition data is the first step to understanding your acquisition cost, a critical statistic that investors look for in startups.

2. Retention - the longer you are able to keep users, the more value they provide. Most smart phone users only use 10% of the apps they download on a daily basis. A good retention rate is also a key indicator that users are satisfied with the user experience and can provide key insights into where to invest development time. Low retention rates might expose a negative user experience that is causing the drop off, like difficult onboarding, confusing navigation, or common bugs. Understanding the retention rate can help eliminate unnecessary steps and hurdles that prevent first-time users from becoming loyal customers.

3. Engagement - engagement can be as simple as DAU (daily active users) and MAU (monthly active users), which tracks the number of active users in a given day or month. However, there are even more metrics you can grab to track engagement, including heat mapping and specific page metrics in order to understand feature engagement. More specificity provides more insight into where users are interacting the most and potentially what feature to add next in order to create the most value for users. 

These metrics are a great starting point for any company to create a picture of how users are interacting with their app. Qualitative data derived from surveys or interviews can help fill in any gaps to better understand the whole picture. As your company evolves, investing more in user data and product analytics can help derive even more insights that propel your business to the next level.