The World Needs Better SaaS Analytics

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?

Our Special WordPress Theme

If you’d like some customization done on the theme, I highly recommend going to our sister site GazelleThemes.com for an awesome and affordable Pro Package for Clean Home. Right off the bat, this has blurb customizations, new color schemes and an improved design (not to mention full customization support)! Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we cannot help users with the free-use GPL theme you’ll find on WordPress.org.

Today marks a big day for us, we’ve released the same custom theme that cloaks this very site! Well, it is a very heavily modified version of this theme, but it retains the style that we’ve got going on. I am rather partial to my minimalism themes (just check out my personal site) but this way it remains clean and sparkly.

Without further ado, I present Clean Home (v 1.2.1), our house theme. You can download it for free now right here. So what’s special about this theme? Let me list the ways:

• Lightweight - A grand total of two images, both 2×6. The rest is XHTML and CSS.
• Minimalistic - No more distracting of your users, with our theme, your content stays king.
• Attention Grabbing - With a semi-customizable (1.1.3) blurb, you can say something right away that people just have to read.
• Full Widget Support - I even took care of some all (1.1.3) of the standard widgets’ CSS for you.
• Valid XHTML and CSS - As long as you stay valid on your end…
• GPL License – New! – Do what you will with the theme!
• Multiple Widget – Now with three sidebars (1.1.4) for maximum customization: top navigation, blurb, and sidebar.
• (Pro) Fully customizable blurb - select between hidden, random phrase, image, and per-post assigned text.
• (Pro) Adsense - three separate locations for Adsense integration.
• (Pro) Color selection - Over 7 color schemes.
• (Pro) Style selection - 2 distinct styles, selectable from inside the options.
• (Pro) Feedburner integration - an email subscribe button plus automatic feed redirection.
• (Pro) Fully customizable Home Page - select different categories and how many articles to showcase!

If you’d like some common custom options, visit our sister site Gazelle Themes for cheap purchasing options for the Pro Package. Otherwise, this is just our way of giving back to the wonderful open source community that makes our business possible.

Go ahead and download it now! Feel free to let us know what you think in the comments! Enjoy!

Check out our home page for any Missouri Web Design help you may need!

Understanding Web Statistics

Web statistics packages are now mainstream and very much accessible to the average web administrator; in the past, this wasn’t always the case. When Google bought Urchin in April of 2005, it was already an industry leading company specializing in providing an statistical package to webmasters allowing them to track pageviews, clickthroughs, sales, bounce rates and more for each individual user. Now, it is the number one analytics package available online, it is free, and it is extremely popular.

So let’s learn a little about web analytics. While it is a great tool and gives insight into your most important of commodities, your users, it has its limitations.

Basic Statistics

There are several statistics available with even the most rudimentary analytics program. These include page views, visits, pages per visit, bounce rate, average time on site, and percentage of new visitors. Let’s break these down:

Read the rest of this entry »