Startup Analytics Tools
There are a bunch of must-have startup analytics tools for both pre-product-market fit and beyond. The idea is to keep things simple and fetch get the insights quick.
Without data, you are just another person with an opinion.
WE Deming
Questions to Answer
Startup Analytics tools in the early days are needed to measure a few metrics and answer a few questions:
- How many users are visiting?
- What is the returning users as a percentage of the total user base?
- What do our monthly/annual retention numbers look like?
- What is the average engagement time?
- What are the best channels?
- Where do people drop off?
Google Analytics can pretty much answer, almost all of the above questions, fairly comprehensively. Though very useful, the tool stops at telling us what’s happening but not why.
This is where a session manager like Hotjar becomes extremely useful and can help answer the why part of the problem. Hotjar is a session recorder, besides being a heat-map tool. This allows one to visualise the sessions of each recording as if standing behind the person using the product.
Some of the questions, and insights we can infer?
- Do we know if the landing page design and the CTA placement are correct?
- Leaks in our UX Flow. Point of maximum drop-offs?
- Any issues in the UI Feel?
- Bugs/Erroneous website behaviours.
- How is copywriting doing?
These tools are incredibly useful to keep a tab on the most important metrics of what and why. An internal log of user activities can be a useful addition as well.
This kind of internal dashboard can be incredibly useful to maybe target people specifically or figure out the North Star for the product. North Star in this context is that metric or user actions post which. The product unlocks the core value for the user. Some popular North Star metrics
- Anyone who made 7 friends on FB, stuck around.
- Google Analytics could be checking 4-5 different metrics.
- Hotjar could be adding the first heat map and watching the first recording.
