Winning with Analytics

One of the fundamental principles that we operate on with siteMighty is having data at our fingertips so that we know what is going on at all times. We do this by 1) setting metrics, 2) gathering data, and 3) presenting it in an actionable way.

I have staked the growth of siteMighty to analytics: we have to know how we are doing and act accordingly. One of my failings with Huckabuck is that we built a great web-app but never had any idea how or if people were using it. In the end, the most concrete data we had were the $2 checks that rolled in from our advertising rev-share.

I got serious about this at SXSW in March. siteMighty was ready for beta launch, and functionally it was ready, but we already knew that we didn’t have data tracking and analysis tools that would enable us to stay on top of siteMighty. And as I’ve said before, getting to launch is like pulling up to the starting line, the race hasn’t even started yet, so I knew we needed tools to understand siteMighty. Ryan Carson blogged about his meeting with Ryan Allis the 22 year old CEO of a multi million dollar company. Ryan wrote:

What really struck me though, was how he knew his numbers inside and out. He is absolutely hard-core about measuring everything. It was like a slap in the face — as CEO of Carson Systems, I just don’t know enough about what’s going on.

It is critical to know what is going on. So, here’s what we are doing about it:

I designed an analytics dashboard that is mocked up over the the right there. Here are the important things we wanted to track:

• Open support tickets

• The Visitors / Conversion / Paying Users funnel (more on that below)

• Server bandwidth usage and capacity(so we’re prepped for a TechCrunching)

• Aggregate stats on our users sites so we know if they are seeing success

• Revenue stats

Our conversion funnel was designed to really understand how many people we have to get to visit siteMighty in order to actually make a paying customer out of people. I got a lot of insight into doing this from Mike McDermont from Freshbooks. I basically built our funnel around the ideas he presented here on Vitamin. I lifted his conversion funnel for our mockup. (Thanks Mike!)

So, after three iterations of our analytics dashboard here we are. Our current version is over to the right.

This has be instrumental in helping us understand what is going on with siteMighty, react to the needs of users, and evaluate the success of our marketing efforts. We keep this screen up all day for a live look at what is going on.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on any successes with analytics or challenges with not having the data you need. I’d be happy to provide insight into what we are tracking and why, and please feel free to use anything you can learn from our analytics package on your web app.

• Related caveat: I just ordered the new book Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning which has been highly recommended. Check it out.