Recently I attended a San Diego Tech Founders: Lean Startup Group meetup, where Hiten Shah (@hnshah), co-founder and CEO of KISSmetrics, presented. He shared an awesome, thought provoking presentation on vanity metrics and how differ from actionable data. In other words, what actions can you take with the metrics that you acquire?
“If your company’s conversion rates increased/decreased by 20%, what would you do?”
The information you accumulate should drive you to make decisions, otherwise what good is your data? BI that doesn’t propel you to move in the right direction has no purpose but to look good on paper– vanity metrics. As the business analyst here at MindTouch, I’ve rummaged through the entire bank of tracked data that powers our funnels. It wasn’t long before I saw that some metrics were just numbers meant to be shared. Sure you can have an 80% increase in downloads, but that has no meaning on its own unless you can apply an action to it. How many installs were there? That conversion ratio can guide your company in taking further steps.
“Is your product really awesome?”
If so, your metrics should reflect that. If not, then you should be able to read your data and come up with a solution. Your macro funnel should only measure a handful of metrics to define what would need improvement. Too much noise will distract from your goal of customer activation and retention.
Make sure to check out KISSmetrics, a person-based analytics platform for your whole team. And if you’re in the San Diego area, the San Diego Tech Founders: Lean Startup Group hosts great events for entrepreneurs to meet potential co-founders and discuss lean startups, customer and product development and business strategy.
