Analytics applied improperly won’t do you any good! Ensuring you have a process of tracking relevant KPIs is essential for achieving success. If you don’t know how to use the data you are collecting, you will waste a lot of time and money. These metrics will help you focus in on what needs to change in your onboarding process, and develop a user onboarding strategy that will help improve your product.
1. Strategy: Daily/Monthly Active Users
Terms to Know:
Daily Active Users (DAU): The total number of users engaging with a product in some way on a given day. To be considered active, users need only view or open the product.
Monthly Active Users (MAU): The aggregate sum of daily active users over the period of a month. To be a MAU, the person need only view or open the product within the monthly period. The ratio of DAU/MAU is a measure of ‘stickiness’ for Internet products.
Measuring active users is one of the most basic insights into how well your product is doing. You should always be tracking how many users are opening it up on a given day/within a month.
Questions to ask about active users: How many users do I have in a given day/month? How often are they signing in?
Why track it: This will give you immediate insight into how well your onboarding process is working to bring people into your product.
2. Strategy: Funnel Goals
After you know how many people are coming into your product, setting up funnels are the best way to start monitoring user drop offs. By setting up funnels for every single point of interaction at the onboarding stage, you can get a much better picture of what’s working, and what isn’t. Consider grouping customers into cohorts to understand behavior based on the parameters that matter to your business to make the maximum impact from all of this hard work!
Questions to ask about funnels: At what stages of onboarding do users most drop off? What stages do they spend the most time on? What are your cohorts telling you about every minute stage of onboarding?
Why track it: Identify the areas where users disconnect with your product; these are optimal areas for experimentation.
3. Strategy: Retention
Terms to Know:
*Retention: The measure of how many users are returning to your product over time. The most common metric used is ‘N-Day’ which is the percentage of users who come back on a specific day, after the first time they use your product.
Measuring retention is a great way to see whether your onboarding process is continuing to work over a period of time. Yes–maybe it gets a lot of people to install the app and use it for a day, but are they still using it 2 days from now? 3 days? 7 days?
Questions to ask about retention: When and how often are users signing into your product? How many times have they used it in the first 24 hours? How does that change over the first week?
Why track it: The ‘N-Day’ metric tells you over what period of time your onboarding process lasts. By focusing on retention you can continue to track it long-term in relation to specific campaigns and product changes to better understand their impact.
4. Strategy: Churn
Terms to Know:
Churn
Churn is the percentage of customers that stop using a service in a specified period of time. It can best be expressed with the equation: number of customers lost during a period divided by the number of customers using the product at the start of the same period.
Your Churn Rate is a way to measure customer satisfaction, and shows you the inverse of retention. In the case of onboarding, churn is valuable because it indicates how quickly people are dropping off from using your product.
Questions to ask about churn: What is your churn rate? How does it change month to month? What is your monthly churn rate compared to annual?
Why track it: Tracking your churn rate within the first 7 days of product install is a great way to determine how well your onboarding process is working. If your churn rate is high, it is a direct indicator that there is a problem with the value of your onboarding process.
5. Strategy: User Engagement
While the number of customers you have is important, how active and engaged with your product they are (and how much they are spending if you’re concerned specifically about SaaS onboarding) helps you understand the impact your onboarding process is having, and help you find new ways to convert in the places you see the best engagement.
Questions to ask about user engagement: How long do users spend with each feature? Which training or onboarding materials are searched, used, referenced the most? How long do users spend on specific tasks, processes, or features?
Why track it: Engagement helps you understand the parts of your service that are most sought after, and capture attention the most. If customers are staying but rarely using the service or not converting frequently, there may be more you can do in onboarding to better motivate customers to more actively use your product.
6. Strategy: User Behavior
Identify the customer onboarding path and track the metrics related to lost customers during the onboarding process. From here, we can use meaningful metrics to improve our product or service based on customer behavior. This will help you identify new onboarding opportunities, such as new content, training materials, product guides or tours, interface improvements, customer support, and so on.
Questions to ask about active user behavior: What stage are users dropping off? How frequently are they using tutorials and training materials? Which training/onboarding materials used most, and which receive negative feedback?
Why track it: Knowing this information can help you determine where you need to change the content, medium, or style of the message you are conveying to make it more accessible and rewarding for the user.
7. Strategy: Improving Product Features
The most or least used features within your service will tell you a lot about what you are doing right and wrong. Get user feedback on your features so that you understand clearly what is scaring users away from your product.
Emphasize the features that are doing well, and perfect them so that people keep using them. Identify areas that aren’t working well and explore ways to improve them. Run some practices on each method, tracking the statistics throughout, and then make changes to improve your overall service for users.
Questions to ask about product features: What features of the product are they using the most? The least? What do people enjoy most about your product and which features need work? When do users access job aides such as tutorials and training materials and for how long?
Why track it: Isolate areas that frustrate, confuse, or alienate users to make training and onboarding flow for these processes smoother and more accessible. Track flaws in the system itself, fix bugs, and identify more serious problems that require design updates or marketing adjustments.
These are all questions to ask when thinking about onboarding, and from them, we can begin to identify relevant metrics to track, analyze, and implement to improve our onboarding process.