Saas Product Metrics - by Users

I have divided Saas product metrics in 3 parts. I have seen these metrics work in tandem and portray a beautiful holistic picture. 

• There are specific product metrics which should be tracked by Customers. How many customers live on your product, how many are onboarded, time to value for a customer, adoption of each customer, upsold customers, churned customers and so on. I have mentioned 12 customer product metrics in a post.

• My next approach is to track Saas product metrics by User. In this post, I will explain key Saas product metrics by Users. 

• I would also recommend a third approach which is platform wise. Platform means a combination of 3 plus products connected together for a user with use cases spanning across the products/ components for the benefit of Users. Platforms also have network effects. Will explain these in a separate post. But if you are a platform with multiple products with 100+ plus customers then this applies to you … 🙋 

This is my uber approach towards Saas product metrics. Some may apply to the product/ platform you are working on, some may not. 

Before moving forward a couple of best practices on how to plot Saas product metrics. These have worked for me very well. 

• I suggest you plot key metrics week over week over time. It is very easy to get lost in analysis paralysis as the number of metrics becomes more and the tools, getting the data, accuracy of those and other challenges creep in. You get the point. 

• In certain cases, users may not do some of the key use cases or their transactions weekly. Example is contract signature. In these high value use cases, it is ok to track these metrics month over month. See what best fits your business. 

• If you have data for metrics which spans multiple years then look at the data to compare year over year. This approach covers seasonality of the product if any. Example - most of the year’s shopping happens during festivals; that means seasonality. So it is always better to use year over year for comparison … 👏 

• Some overlap may happen in metrics. Agree with teams on these overlaps and move forward. Working backwards gives a very valuable input and output metrics framework. Refer to it. Track both input as well as output metrics. 

Hope you are learning with me. Let me give a couple of more pointers on how to act on these metrics. It is important to build the muscle of data tracking, data collection, data cleaning, charting metrics and maybe eventually do a weekly automation where the entire company can see the metrics in a Dashboard … 🎉  

However, this sophistication is not mandatory. The point is you track the metric over a period of time to improve your product. 

A couple of more pointers on how to act on metrics. 

• For saas products it is always good to have goals. Example - this year our goal is to reach 100k subscriptions/ users. 

• Figure out key 4-6 metrics which exponentially improve the goals, business growth and revenue and at least set those up. I trust you have an owner for each metric. 

• To act on metrics there are various versions such as having an annual plan or quarterly plan. I have seen both work well. The point is that teams undertake initiatives and work towards improving the metrics. These Saas product metrics are agreed to be important for business and revenue growth so the initiatives which improve these metrics are already a priority … 🏆 

This plan has worked well for me. Hope it works for you too. 

Here is a refresher quote for you - 

The sales department isn’t the whole company, but the whole company better be the sales department.

—- Philip Kotler

Let’s get into Saas product metrics by users. 

• Number of active users on your Saas product and how users are in the pipeline which means how many users are you expecting to get onboarded in the next 3 to 6 months. This metric helps in planning. 

• Dormant users means the users who have onboarded however have not done any action in the product for more than 30 days. In case of your product the 30 days timeline can be 7 or 15 days based on the use case. 

• Churned users is the number of users which we have lost. It is beneficial to track churned users and dormant users as % of active users. This metric helps in benchmarking the Saas product adoption. 

Now, to actual user adoption metrics. 

• MAUs and DAUs. A ratio of DAU/ MAU is also helpful if you have a product which users are expected to use everyday. DAU and MAUs should also be tracked as % of all active Users … 🏍️   

• Transactions per week/ month. It is important to measure the transactions per month. This means that the users are actually getting value when they log in or are active week over week and month over month. Transactions can be viewing a report, sending an email or similar. This covers everything the user does. I am putting this in one bucket for understanding. 

• Most recent log in - for Saas we wish that the users log in everyday. For a scaled product, it may not be sufficient just to know that the users are weekly active, but what was each user’s most recent login as well. 

• Time to value for a user - This is one of the most important user onboarding metrics. Many times users login and do not do their first transaction until weeks and months. I am sure you have seen this. So it is important to track and act on time to value for each user which is in how many days they do their first key transaction which is the actual premise behind the saas product … 🏂 

• Monthly engagement cohorts - these may get a bit complex as you have more and more metrics. However selecting 2 to 4 metrics and looking them in cohorts give valuable insights which can be used to increase user engagement and product adoption. 

• Reasons for user churn - this is not a metric but knowing why users are churning is very valuable to act upon and fix. This can be done through 1:1 user engagement in case of b2b Saas or email/ in-app surveys. 

Based on the Saas product you have there can be a combination of these metrics. It is key to understand the metrics which matter, which impacts the goal and act on those for the greater good of Saas business and Users. 

……. 

Swagat Irsale is Growth Advocate. He works with startups and scale ups to grow revenue and build products which enterprises love to use. 

Reach him for work and partnership opportunities.