The World Needs Better SaaS Analytics

Posted: March 24th, 2011 | Author: Bryan | Filed under: Analytics | 2 Comments »

New and exotic analytics packages are all the rage nowadays. Traditionally, packages like Google Analytics were most common, and you can even go open source with Piwik (which does much of the same thing). There are also event based services like KissMetrics and MixPanel, which are useful when you have a complex app where events may or may not be interrelated.

Those are all well and good, but what I really want is a nice, comprehensive service for tracking software as a service funnels, signups, and paid plan conversions with baked in churn, lifetime value, and other vital SaaS statistics.

Why don’t current packages work?

They all seem to cater to specific uses that are more or less useless when you run a business selling subscriptions for online software. For instance, Google Analytics (or GA) is pretty much the web analytics poster child. However, it is really focused on pageviews and e-commerce style goals. It doesn’t understand the nature of subscriptions and that not all goals are created equal.

For example, a user that signs up for a trial is good, but it doesn’t put money in my pocket. Likewise, a user that converts from trial to paid is great but if they only pay for a month or two before cancelling, that’s not as good as sticking around for perpetuity. GA also falls short of tracking that user’s actions that might lead to a paid conversion. And let’s not even mention differing plans.

KissMetrics and MixPanel move in the right direction but unfortunately, they fall flat as well. Luckily, you can track and build complex funnels and see which events generally precede other events, but making a conversion an event with no associated cost tracking pretty much brings us back to square one. What are these events worth? Where is the traffic coming from?

What would be the perfect solution?

My perfect solution would that let me tag user types and assign a recurring value to those user types. For example, a free user has little to no value. A trial user has more value, but still very little. A paid user has a distinct value which can be adjusted based on the current plan. Ideally, an elegant solution for tracking signups, conversions, payments, cancellations and various transactions would make things a lot easier.

Also, it would collect all the traditional stuff like GA does. Think referrer, entrance page, time on site, etc…

Once all that data is server side, we can get an awesome revenue dashboard with baked in analytics similar to GA. We can track churn and lifetime customer value by all the usual metrics: traffic source, landing page, campaigns and more. We can see how certain funnels perform according to metrics that matter to our bottom line. We’re talking powerful, decision enabling stuff.

So, would you be interested?

I’ve been building my own private analytics package for tracking BitBuffet.com, but I am thinking about polishing it up and making it public. You can view my placeholder here: SaaS analytics.

What would you want to see? Am I missing any key features?

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