Hot answers tagged metrics
19
One piece of advice I frequently give startup founders: don't try to invent two things at once.
You've got enough problems inventing a new product which you are trying to launch. That is the entrepreneurial risk you are taking. Don't risk the whole thing by also trying to invent a new way to allocate equity.
You're going to need every brain cell you've ...
13
Everything I know about analytics, I learned from the following two posts:
Web Optimizer Case Study
Vanity Metrics vs Action Metrics
Biggest takeaway from these is that A/B testing is what the situation calls for 9/10. And for that, there's Google Website Optimizer.
7
a) Run your first user tests from a VPS. Head over to serverfault.com and stackoverflow.com , and find the previously asked questions about best Windows VPS + SQLServer hosting providers.
b) Head over to BrowserMob or a similar scalability testing service, and run tests against your site to get a ballpark figure for how many users it can handle. Be sure to ...
6
Two things I would recommend:
Visit the Occam's Razor blog by Avinash Kaushik.
Get yourself a copy of the book "Web Analytics An Hour A Day" also by Avinash
There is so much good information about analytics from these two sources. Avinash works at Google but he does a good job of writing about analytics without a particular toolset in mind.
5
Good question.
I've logged into a few new web apps recently, and have experienced that 'what do I do now?' feeling on the first use.
For that reason, I'm putting a lot of effort into merging my sign up workflow and user experience into the first few uses of my app, keeping them on board and walking them through the app, hopefully motivating my users to ...
4
Excellent question!
Here's a few of my opinions on the topic:
Focus on conversion % (as Eric Ries explains: page views is simply a vanity metric - it's almost always going to increase and doesn't really provide you with any insights)
Segment Google Analytics information into at least three profiles: Organic, Referral and Search. This will allow you to ...
4
The main metrics to look at is:
User count and growth: How many users do you have, and how is this growing
Retention: How many users come back to your site
Activity: This is define by whatever you provide, but basically you want to know if users are actually doing something on your site
Assuming you sell something:
Conversion rate (very importante!!):
...
4
Having each employee track how many hours go into production and how many go into sales/marketing is the easy answer. In reality, it can be very hard to keep a team of people that accountable, and anyone you show those numbers to will be a little skeptical. On top of that, I would think you run a high risk of losing time to task switching when the same ...
4
There is also a relevant post by 37 Signals on this topic:
http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch09_The_Blank_Slate.php
For the design of traditional management information BI dashboards, I can't recommend this book highly enough:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Information-Dashboard-Design-Effective-Communication/dp/0596100167
4
Joe - Since you're building on Microsoft's stack, definitely check out Microsoft BizSpark - if you're a startup, less than 3 years old, < $1m revenue you get development/testing and production licenses for team foundation, Sequel Server, IIS., etc. free. Furthermore, certain Hosting companies - such as Rackspace - will cut you a deal. I'm not sure if ...
4
The problem I have with coming up with a system for earning (or retaining) equity is that, apart from being nearly impossible to come up with a "fair" system, it ultimately undermines the trust that you have within your team.
I really like the 37 signals analogy that "choosing co-founders is like a marriage" and what you guys are really saying with a system ...
3
Assuming you're not operating a website for highly confidential data, I'd go with tracking clicks in aggregate, meaning that it's ok for you to know that 20% of people click on picture A.
But I would not collect, throw away or never look at the data that says "john@foo.com clicked at 5am". You don't need data to contain personal information.
Patterns are ...
3
I'd recommend picking up a copy of Avinash Kaushik's "Web Analytics 2.0". It's a great read and will definitely generate some ideas on how to convert a pile of data into actionable insights.
It's a bit of a "heavier" read than many marketing books (including mine) but well worth the effort.
2
Google Analytics is good for traffic trends (pageviews) over time and compete with classic web site measurement suites like Omniture and WebTrends. They have Events (rather clunky implementation) and Funnels, but they are most for histrorical reporting rather than actionable metrics that you can use to tune your online business. Also, they are not ...
2
and welcome to this site! :-)
There really is no way to say. It depends completely on the market, the audience, the quality of the offering, and the marketing. Many software-as-a-service type companies see conversion rates between 1% and 5%, but depending on the aforementioned, anything from 0% to 25% can be commonplace.
The next question would be ...
2
Hiya, I worked for WhiteLabelDating, so have a bit of experience, but take my views with the usual grain of salt.
1 - The dating industry is an interesting one. While nominally you are helping people find the person they will be with for the rest of their life... this doesn't help you for repeat sales... it also doesn't really match the usual reality.
So, ...
2
Are you using any form of CRM system at the moment does it have any of the metrics you are after if so it maybe fairly simple to extract that info and show in GMail?
We use a CRM system called Capsule (though any good CRM should do what Capsule does for us) it has a Gmail/Apps integration for adding users into the system automatically allowing ...
2
I like the concept and the buy in on shareholding that is a very good idea.
What you haven't said is
How you will set the agreed targets
When you will measure the targets (weekly/monthly/quarterly) or is it more "when the target is met THEN you get the shares.
How many shares you get back when hitting a target. Is it a buy in over 2 years and you get ...
2
In order for this real world research to be sound, I would say that you would require raw data that can be interpreted. Having spent some time in the retail industry myself, I would not trust data that is generated by employees.
Something funny starts happening when you ask them to monitor how long it takes them to dish out change. For example, they wont ...
1
By itself it is not a sufficient indicator. You have to look also at the number of unique visitors (or use the number of average page views per visit).
After that, you also have to separate depending on the sources of the page views (search engines, referring sites and direct access).
Concerning access thanks to search engines, look at the keywords used by ...
1
The question How much does on average customer/visitor support account to? is quite general but I could suggest one way you can estimate and then find it out through experimentation:
Support staff is usually a fixed cost you could estimate, e.g. 1000 USD a month.
How many of your paying customers are likely to request support? There is no rule of the ...
1
1 - I would monitor it. Do you have a "last signed-in" date in your database? Get some metrics around how long people have been signed up and still using the site. You can also use this to send emails to people saying "You haven't visited the site in a while. 200 (fe)males have joined in your area since your last visit!".
3 - The more females the ...
1
Deb, as Jesper pointed out, the answer is: it depends. Your market is a huge factor in identifying an average conversion rate.
Another thing to point out is the quality of your traffic. Where and how are you getting your traffic? If your traffic is very targeted, your conversion rate will be much higher than if it's not.
To give you an example, let's say ...
1
Here some conversion rate examples from clients that use the funnel tool in reedge.com
- Free download to program (by direct referrals) 60%
- Free download of great whitepaper (only email needed) 12%
- Free sign-up for saas trial 12%-15%
- Actual sign-up 2%-5% to paid service
- ecommerce shop should be able to do 1%-3%
1
Great question with a though answer...
I don't think there's a real answer for it, but here's my 2 cents on this subject.
It's kind of "obvious" that the balance should be drawn where your business does not suffer and you're not sending customers away.
Is the click tracking system hurting your business? If so, and if it is not sending away customers, then ...
1
I don't have a formula for you, but I think you should also consider the number of reads a project has had, along definitely with the number of submissions received and the number accepted.
There seems to be a hint that in most cases there's a virtual team being formed - so another variable could be the number of members sought.
1
First off, you can track what's being clicked on in just about any analytics package, you may just have to set it up manually. In Google Analytics I think it's called "event tracking".
In the past, may uISV's recommended Clicky. It is not strongly optimized towards cohort or funnel analysis. It is more of a general tool in the same way Google Analytics is, ...
1
Outside of traffic it depends what other metrics you're looking for. Unless you ask your users to register and fill out some date in their profile, it is probably a good idea to have a multiple sources, by comparing which, you will get a better idea of what your typical user looks like.
Google Analytics is a good start.
Compete is another tracking ...
1
I don't know what features are you looking for, but I really like Pentaho. The only downside is sometimes you have to hack the code to get the features you want since the source is provided for you aswell. But all in all I think it is a very professional BI tool.
1
Business intelligence covers a wide area, e.g. tools to help build reports, pre-packaged solutions that work with specific apps, etc. I would start here and check out some of the free and open source solutions.
Also look at this previous question.
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