I’m a HUGE believer in running a metrics driven SaaS business. In fact, I think it’s basically a pre-requisite for running a successful SaaS business these days and the web is filled with great stories of how the most successful SaaS companies (HubSpot, SEOMoz, KISSmetrics, etc.) are maniacal about their metrics and what that has given them.

While it’s all well and good to believe in that, actually implementing these metrics can be much more difficult. It’s a process i’ve been through three times now (each time using KISSmetrics) and I wanted to share with you the metrics that we’ve considered important in the past.

There is a school of thought out there that you should only be tracking a few key metrics, and while I tend to agree with that I have an amendment: track everything you possibly can, but focus only what’s important. The reason I say this is that when it comes time to optimise one of those key metrics, it’s useful to have the other metrics to help you understand how to go about it.

On that note, I present to you guys a large list of metrics you, as a SaaS company, should be tracking. This by all means isn’t a comprehensive list and it definitely should be adapted to the unique attributes of your business, but hopefully it provides a good starting point or reference point for ideas.

Business Intelligence Metrics

Business Intelligence Metrics give you insight into your success against primary business KPI’s (and the sub-metrics that drive those KPI’s). These include:

Revenue

• Total revenue over specified time period – Revenue earned from customers in the specified time period
• Average Revenue Per Customer – Average revenue an individual customer generates over the given time period
• Lifetime value – Predicted lifetime revenue per customer.

Customers

• Unique Visits – Total Unique Visits to your marketing website over specified time period
• Total Signups – Total number of people who signed up for an account in the specified time period
• Average time to signup – Average time between first visit and signup
• Total Purchasers – Total number of people who became paying customers in the specified time period
• Activated – Total number of people who activated within the specified time period
• Time to Purchase – Average time it takes people to go from signup to purchase
• Time to activation – Total time it takes to go from signup to activation
• Visitor conversion rate – Percentage of people who visited site then purchased
• Signup conversion rate – Percentage of people who signed up then purchased
• Activation conversion rate – Percentage of people who ‘Activated’ then purchased
• Logins to activation – How many times a user logs in between Signup and Activation
• Logins to Purchase – Total number of times a user logs in to the application before Purchase.
• Cancellations – Number of people who became paying customers then cancelled their account
• Time to cancel – Total time between Purchase and Cancel
• Churn Rate – % of people who became paying customers then cancelled their account

Funnels

Funnels allow you to track users progress down a pre-defined path (such as the main visit site – signup – activation – purchase funnel), and are brilliant for analysing where and why users may be dropping off and how to fix it. In KISSmetrics, a funnel report looks a bit like this:

I wish I could tell you what funnels you should be tracking, but the fact of the matter is it’s completely different for each business. A couple I do recommend exploring and customising to your business are as follows:

• Main Customer Acquisition Funnel – As seen in the image above, it is usually defined as Visit Site, Sign Up, Activate and Billed. This is your main customer acquisition funnel and is extremely important to track.
• Activation Funnel – These are the steps a user takes to become ‘Activated’. This is different for each SaaS company but i thoroughly recommend working out what it is for yours and tracking it intensely. If you don’t know what Activation is, KISSmetrics wrote a great post about it on their blog.

Marketing Intelligence Metrics

Marketing Intelligence metrics give us insight into what the most successful marketing channels are, so we can understand when, where and how to scale our sales & marketing machine.

For each customer acquisition channel you utilise (lSEO, SEM, Guest Posting, Blogging, etc.), you should be tracking the following metrics:

• Total revenue over specified time period – Revenue earned from customers in the specified time period from the selected customer acquisition channel
• Unique Visits – Total Unique Visits to our website over specified time period from the selected customer acquisition channel
• Total Signups – Total number of people who signed up for a free trial in the specified time period from the selected customer acquisition channel
• Average Time to Signup – Average time between first visit and signup when coming the selected customer acquisition channel
• Total Paying Customers – Total number of people who became paying customers in the specified time period from the selected customer acquisition channel
• Time to paying – Average time it takes people to go from signup to paying customer from the selected customer acquisition channel
• Visitor conversion rate – Percentage of people who visited site then became paying customers when coming from the selected customer acquisition channel
• Signup conversion rate – Percentage of people who signed up then became paying customers when coming from the selected customer acquisition channel
• Activated – Total number of people who activated within the specified time period when coming from the selected customer acquisition channel
• Time to activation – Total time it takes to go from signup to activation when coming from the selected customer acquisition channel
• Logins to activation – How many times a user logs in between Signup and Activation when coming from the selected customer acquisition channel
• Logins to paying – Total number of times a user logs in to the application before paying when coming from the selected customer acquisition channel
• Cancellations – Number of people who became paying customers then cancelled their account when coming from the selected customer acquisition channel
• Churn Rate – % of people who became paying customers then cancelled their account when coming from the selected customer acquisition channel
• Deactivations – Number of people who signed up but their accounts became deactivated (represents people who signed up for free trials but they’re account was deactivated as they never became paying customers) when coming from the selected customer acquisition channel
• Deactivation rate – Percentage of people who signed up for free trial but they’re accounts got deactivated when coming from the selected customer acquisition channel
• Lifetime value – Predicted lifetime revenue per customer when coming from the selected customer acquisition channel

All in all, if you can get these metrics implemented using a system like KISSmetrics it should provide a very solid foundation for making data-driven decisions across your customer acquisition and retention activities.

If you decide to implement any of these, please leave a comment below and let me know how they go for you!