The best way to monitor your most important SaaS metrics

Published in

The Startup

6 min readJul 18, 2018

I’ve lost count of how many times someone on my team asks for conversion goals, financial projections, or some random analytical metric. Then I direct them to my lengthy, indecipherable, static Google Sheets projections and say “I’ve already shared this doc with you, but here you go again!” If you’re familiar with this situation, you’re not alone.

Tracking your most important SaaS metrics is time consuming and challenging because they change so rapidly and demand constant recalculations. Your key metrics must always be up-to-date, accessible, and presentable. In this article I am going to teach you how to build the right dashboard. One that you can share with your team, partners, and investors. One that sends you daily reports and allow you to share your most recent live data with anyone. One that looks like this:

Learn the key metrics

Understanding the key metrics is crucial. What do you need to know every single morning when you start work?

Okay, let’s imagine you are marketing a SaaS company who is selling a $99 monthly subscription to customers. You offer a 14-day trial use of your software. Also, your application has a set of steps to be completed by your customers in order to start using your software, and potentially pay you. What is the most valuable data you should have instant access to when marketing a SaaS company? Let’s review them:

Visitors: How many people have visited your website?
Leads: How many of those tried contacting you via your website chat, contact form, calendar demos, or landing pages?
Free trials: What percentage sign up for a free trial?
Qualified leads: How many of the free trial accounts went through all of the on-boarding steps?
Paying customers: How many people paid you?
Average revenue per account (ARPA): What is the average revenue you make per customer per month?
Lifetime value (LTV): How much will a customer pay you throughout their lifetime on average?
Churn rate: What is the rate of your account cancellations? How many people cancel every month?
MRR and ARR: What is your monthly and annual recurring revenue?

The goal is to put all this information into a chart that you can refer to everyday and be aware of your marketing progress. Compare your monthly, weekly, and daily reports. You can build this dashboard with five primary tools: Google Analytics, Intercom, Stripe, Servicebot, and Databox.

Use Google Analytics

As simple as it sounds. Make sure you are using Google Analytics (GA) to keep track of your daily visitors. GA will give you the website and landing page traffic data alongside the geographical location, visit duration, and page by page analytics. All you have to do is to copy and paste the GA embed code into your website and make sure it’s tracking your traffic. Simple and easy.

Manage with Intercom

I know there are many options for website chat, but Intercom is way more than just a chat platform. Intercom will let you manage all your leads and basically answer half of the questions we went through above. To get the maximum results from Intercom, try the following:

Setup your website chat. Intercom gives you an embed code that you can copy and paste into your website and your customers can start a conversation with you. Each new conversation will count as a lead in Intercom.
Forward all your leads to Intercom. You may have a contact form where people send you inquiries, a demo scheduler for showing your product to potential customer, or simply have leads contacting you directly by email. Don’t keep these leads separate. Move them all to Intercom by forwarding all lead emails to your Intercom account. Intercom has this functionality out of the box.
Send usage data to Intercom. It is not required, but if you really want to get fancy, you can send your customer usage data from your SaaS straight into Intercom to track on-boarding conversions. This will teach you a great deal about your on-boarding process.

If you are a startup, apply for Intercom early stage startup program.

Sell with Stripe and Servicebot

Hopefully you don’t have some custom built billing solution to sell you SaaS. If you do, I would suggest switching to tools that take the burden off of your shoulders. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Create a Stripe account, then create a Servicebot account, connect your Stripe to Servicebot, and you got yourself a fancy SaaS management platform with credit card payment processor. A platform that can gather all your financial data, mix it with Intercom data, and send it over to Databox.

Servicebot helps create your pricing table, allow your customers to signup for your software, upgrade and downgrade their plan, update their credit card, and cancel their account with you. All you have to do is:

Setup your offering. Create your SaaS offering and add your pricing.
Use the embeddables. Use Servicebot embeddable codes to embed pricing table, billing, and checkout UI elements into your website and SaaS.
Connect to Intercom. Connect your Intercom account to Servicebot to import your lead activity and qualification information.

Servicebot can then get all the conversion and financial statistics sent to Databox on a daily basis.

View with Databox

Finally, it is time for you to show your data. There is no easier and faster tool to build an on-demand analytical chart than Databox. They’ve created an extraordinary user interface that allows you to drag and drop data from different connections right into your chart. Once you have completed the steps above, getting your SaaS analytical dashboard is very easy using Databox:

Connect to Google Analytics. Databox is deeply integrated with Google Analytics. It is one of their strongest connections and you can get any visitor data into your chart from GA.
Connect to Servicebot. Create a new custom connection and let Servicebot send your data to Databox. Then you can drag and drop different widgets into your chart and populate them with the Servicebot analytical data.

Share your dashboard

Be proud of your new dashboard and share it with everyone. People will never ask you about conversion and financial goals again. Show your investors your SaaS growth rate and improve your marketing campaigns with your data.

If you need help setting up your SaaS analytics dashboard, you can book a 15 minute consultation with me using my Calendly link.