How To Measure & Analyze MVP Performance
A high-level introduction to analyzing a web-based MVP
Startups often rely on a trimmed down version of their idea, often known as the MVP, to further validate the initial market survey. Being able to measure the performance of this minimal version of a product/service/app is very important after the soft launch.
The main goal of launching an MVP is to test how the market reacts and if you fail to incorporate some basic mechanisms to gauge customer behavior, it can become very tough to test the basic version of the idea.
Most startups have a limited budget in the early days and are functioning on seed funding. The ability to analyze performance and take actions based on it may be the single most important factor in your startup’s future and it may help you convince an investor to help you secure the funds to keep you afloat after the MVP.
Here are a few ideas regarding how you can start to measure your product; this is purely based on opinion and our experiences of building different digital products at Aurora Solutions.
User Feedback
As trivial as it sounds, many products in beta don’t let the users easily provide feedback. App reviews for apps launched on the IOS Appstore or Google Play serve a different purpose, all you need is a simple mechanism for the user to provide feedback to the app creator. Here’s what can be done in a short time to collect some valuable feedback:
- Let the user share their experience regarding any part of the app using a free text field. Once submitted, the feedback can be sent as an email, recorded in a database, or an online spreadsheet.
- You should collect information about any crashes and un-handled cases. If you have launched the app as Test Flight on IOS or as a Beta on Android to a specific set of users then you can get some of this information from your IOS or Android developer consoles. This can help you improve user experience in the upcoming versions.
Analytics & Metrics
What kind of metrics should you choose? This will depend mostly on both your short term goals and long term goals. Generally, the best way to go about it is to work your path from the big picture to the small picture.
Example: Your primary goal is to get more users to signup on your website. Following metrics may be of importance to you:
- Unique visitors: Total number of unique visitors on your product.
- Conversion rate: Percentage of those unique visitors that signed up.
- A/B testing results: How the conversion results differed for different signup scenarios.
We’ll take a look at different kinds of metrics as categorized by Dave Mclure, a renowned investor.
- Quantitative
This is the most common form of metrics, it lets you track and report usage of your product at a high level e.g. average user session, bounce rate, conversion percentage.
Google Analytics is a common tool that lets you measure quantitative metrics, break them down based on different demographics and traffic sources. It also links nicely with Google Adwords so if you’re driving traffic from paid ads on Google Adwords, you can measure how your ads are performing directly in Google Analytics console.
If you are using other sources of advertising channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram then it’s a good idea to use their Analytics tools to track customer behavior and apply better targeting. e.g. Facebook pixel integration into your website can let you track customer actions and then target your next ad campaigns accordingly. - Qualitative
This metric focuses on the individual actions of a user or a small group of users. You may test your product for usability by different techniques of monitoring user sessions. Video Analysis is a good way of watching how individual users interact with your product. Some of the services that let you record user sessions include User Testing, Inspectlet, and Visual Website Optimizer.
Click-maps and Heat-maps are a good way of analyzing user actions in terms of their behavior on your product and are also offered by services like the Visual Website Optimizer. - Comparative
As the name suggests, comparative metrics let you compare different scenarios in your product. This can help you make up your mind on things like “which elements in the User Interface are best suited to a specific screen” or “how a specific workflow to buy your product is preferred by the site visitors over the other”.
Tools like Visual Website Optimizer let you run different kinds of comparative tests like the A/B Testing and Multivariate Testing.
Conclusion
Everything you do should be linked to the long term and short term goals of your startup. It’s important to keep things lean during your MVP stage so you don’t want to fall into the trap of focusing too much on metrics and get side-tracked. It’s important to find the right balance so you can use metrics to get the right information. You can then use this information to help transform your product into its best possible version while making sure that your long term goals are met.
