What if you designed a set of KPI’s to track your product’s performance and instead of giving you insights to improve, it turned out to be a mindless chase of numbers without giving a clear understanding of your product’s performance? Read on to discover our 20 Product performance metrics that will help you to assess how your product based business is doing.
Mohita Jaiswal - November 2018
Great products fail when the right questions are not asked before measuring product performance. When KPI’s do not support business objectives and strategic goals. When they do not support employee growth and motivation. Or when KPI’s only entail financial and process-based monitoring and skip to track the usage of the product to determine its performance.
Why is measuring customer usage of value?
Usage Analysis is crucial to gain insights into transforming and improving a product. Based on the insights gathered from actual usage, one can understand the underlying user motivations for using a product, in a way of how a certain product is used and how the product adds value to the user.
Analyzing and feeding in usage data, works as a feedback loop for product improvization. In digital design (app/ application/ portal/ website) mostly, when working on change management or digital transformation, expertise in data-driven design comes in handy in informing strategic moves. However, it is very important to have a sight of key metrics, questions or indicators so that we have a structure to measure up against and track progress towards goals.
Determining the right metrics for your Digital Product
Imagine having a content streaming application as your product, similar to Netflix. One of your product goals could be to ensure – users enjoy the videos they watch. You could say that an increased amount of time they spend watching those videos could point to the fact they enjoy your content. And to measure the occurrence of this behavior, you track the average number of minutes spent watching videos per user, per day.
While creating KPI’s for your product it is important to start with creating goals that are aligned to both the product and business vision. How might the success or failure in these goals actually manifest itself in user behavior or attitudes? Once you determine a behavior which is likely to indicate the success of your goal it can be then made measurable, through spelling out specific and time-bound metrics you can track over time or use for comparison in an A/B test. Keeping achievable targets(metric figures) as a baseline to indicate the success of your goals, is also indispensable to preventing a KPI fail.
Think Design has developed a set of about twenty indicators that can be generalized to several contexts. This list may serve as a ready reckoner to your teams when you are planning to analyze usage:
1. Objective: Attracting and converting visitors to leads
The action or actions customers take which tell you definitively that they intend to use the product or feature can help you understand if strangers are attracted to your product. These metrics can help one to.capture the intent of the user to use and ascertain the traction of the product’s marketing strategy.
Required Behavior
Metric
Appearance in search results/ queries
Impressions: Volume of appearance in search results/ queries
Lead forms filled
Leads: Volume of contact details captured
Unique visitors visit
Unique visits: Volume of visits by unique users
Referral Visitors visit
Referrals: Volume of visits initiated from referrals (social media, third party sites, email links, forums etc.)
Support calls made
Call volume: Volume of support calls made by users
Support tickets raised
Tickets: Volume of support tickets raised
2. Objective: Acquisition of customers and revenue generation
These metrics are a clear indicator of your product’s success in concrete numbers. If your product isn’t addressing the right customer need, then it’s unlikely that you’re going to be able to attract new users. To make sure that your product is really able to deliver value, it is important to dig deeper into understanding your target market’s jobs to be done and numbers on the board.
Required Behavior
Metric
Pre-defined destinations/ goals clocked
Conversions: Volume of pre-defined destinations/ goals clocked
Revenue generated from a user
Lifetime Value: Revenue/ User from his/ her registration to de-activation
Amount transacted by the user
Avg. Ticket price: Average amount transacted by the user
3. Objective: Positive user Engagement
User engagement validates the extent to which a customer continues to gain value from the product or feature (how much, how often, over how long a period of time etc). It is detrimental to capture this information as it the clearest indicator to access if the product is meeting users’ expectations irrespective of the amount of new users it might be attracting. It helps in understanding if users are able to derive real value from the product or feature, even once acquired.
Required Behavior
Metric
User engaged for greater time
Session duration: Amount of time users are engaged on the site, app or a webpage
Action taken on application/product
Engagement volume: Volume of users who took action/s on the app
Clicking on links
CTR/ Click Through Rate: Volume of successful clicks on a link
Users showcase positive understanding of message
Comprehension: Users’ understanding of a message
4. Objective: Successful user completion of tasks
Metrics to measure task completion can indicate information about the ease of completing different tasks which are a part of the customer journey. It can also help to know behavioral metrics of user experience like user efficiency to complete tasks, effectiveness and the kind and frequency of errors logged, contributing to provide insights on improving product UX.
Required Behavior
Metric
Time taken to complete tasks
Time to task: Amount of time taken by users from task initiation to task completion
Exits taken from a feature/task etc.
Exits: Volume of exits on a particular page, an event or an action
Carts unconverted to purchase
Cart abandonment: Volume of carts that didn’t convert to purchase
Errors logged
Errors: Volume of errors logged
Forms abandonment
Form abandonment: Volume of forms abandoned after initiation
5. Objective: Positive User Feedback
The happiness and satisfaction of the users is the most active and primary source of information to assess product performance and perceived ease of use. The user attitudes gives an opportunity to evaluate and align product with the needs and motivations of your users.
Required Behavior
Metric
Users satisfaction feedback
There’s so much video content available, and the paradox of choice is always overwhelming – so there’s a huge opportunity to innovate around how that ocean of content can be distilled down into content which the user might need to watch, on any of her selected devices.
Deactivations of subscription/product/feature
Attrition: Volume of de-activations
Choose consciously to succeed
Determining the right KPI’s involves clearly defining your product’s objective as aligned with the business and customer objectives. Using these goals one can determine the user behavior and attitude which is expected and convert it into a specific, measurable and time-bound metric. It is not a question of the number of metrics to be used, but to rather ascertain which of those, most precisely help one assess and track the progress towards strategic goals.
