3 Main Problems of Your Current Analytics Tool

Yes, we have launched yet another analytics tool!

But why does the world need another analytics service? Today lots of companies are trying to be data driven. There are a lot of analytics tools for product, marketing and administrative teams that help understand attribution, user behaviour, finance etc. But we decided to build another one. Why? What problems remained unsolved?

Problem 1. You waste huge amount of time on integration

For example, you started a new SaaS project. Of course, before acquiring new customers, it’s necessary to set up your analytics. What do you need to measure?

Here is the list of metrics that most SaaS startups should know:

• New Visitors
• Registrations
• Purchases
• Registration Conversion
• Payment Conversion
• Users Retention
• Customers Retention
• Churn rate
• Customer Acquisition Cost
• Customer Lifetime Value
• Average Revenue Per Account
• Monthly Recurring Revenue
• MRR movements
• Total Subscribers
• Churned Subscribers

And yet this is not the ultimate list of metrics.

Also, you need to be able to segment each of those metrics by traffic source, cohorts, pricing plan and other parameters relevant to your business.

If we use a standard event-based analytics tool like Mixpanel, we should go through rather complicated integration process:

1. Create a list of necessary events and parameters
2. Explain to developer how to implement it and resolve all the issues with sending events from frontend and backend
3. Validate all the received events
4. Integrate all current customers with analytics system and insert all necessary parameters

The whole integration process can last from a few weeks to a whole month. And if your developer is not experienced enough and you don’t have an analyst who can help handle the integration process, you can receive wrong data.

But the most important thing is that even if you set up everything right you will not get all the aforementioned metrics in convenient way. Which leads us to the next problem.

Problem 2. You still need Excel

When I worked in mobile game industry I had to export a lot of CSV spreadsheets during my analytics work. And that’s ok when you have complicated product with hundreds of events and parameters.

But why has nobody figured out yet how to calculate all the standard metrics automatically? There are some attempts to solve this problem using payment systems data. Such products like Baremetrics and Chartmogul take data from payment systems APIs (like Stripe Connect) and convert it to financial metrics.

By using these tools, you can calculate MRR, LTV, ARPA, number of new and churned customers. But none of them can help you segment them by marketing channels, they can’t measure your conversion to payments and show the behaviour of February’s cohort of visitors.

That’s why for the full picture of your business you still need to use one or two more analytics tools, export all the data to Excel and create your KPI dashboard there.

Problem 3. You can’t segment your KPIs

Even if you have built all the needed KPIs using Excel or you’ve developed a beautiful and informative dashboard, you still have some issues to solve. Every analyst knows that most of the key insights come from deep segmentation process. But there isn’t a single analytics tool (or maybe I just don’t know of it, if so tell me that in the comments) that can segment your KPIs like MRR, LTV or ARPA. Without segmentation, you won’t be able to measure your marketing ROI from each channel and understand your unit-economics.

Everybody knows that unit-economics is based on the LTV > CAC relation. But almost nobody can measure LTV and CAC by each channel and cohort separately.

Solution

It looks like we have found solutions to each of these problems.

On one hand, we count your visitors and acquisition channels using our own counter (similar to how Google Analytics does it). On the other hand, we collect your customers payment data from payment systems APIs (Stripe connect) or you can send this data directly to our server. And the main thing is that we bind these types of data together to know exactly what channels your customers come from.

So in order to collect all the needed metrics using our solution you just need to make the three simple steps:

1. Add the counter to the site
2. Import purchase data (if you use Stripe, you just need to click “Connect with Stripe” button)
3. Connect visits and purchase data through our API (you will need a little help from your developer here)

And that’s it, all the rest is on us: metrics calculation, segmentation, cohorts, linking to users and lots of other things. So you can finally get a full picture of your SaaS business, see your marketing channels analytics and unit economics calculations without laborious efforts.

If you want to try out our product please register here: https://revealytics.com/register
We’ll also be happy to hear your suggestions at hello@revealytics.com

This article originally appeared on the Revealytics Blog.