Evaluating the data you collect with specialized tools is all a part of growth analytics. Businesses can grow in various ways through their revenue, customer base, and conversion rate. It’s essential to understand the information coming in about your users and your company as a whole to measure your own success.
Join us for an exploration of various growth metrics and how to analyze your company’s progress with them.
What Are Growth Metrics?
Growth metrics are the key measurements of your business. Like other metrics, they’re made of objective numerical data, but growth metrics are specifically used in analytics to monitor your business’ growth over time. They’re used to calculate growth KPIs which look at how your company measures up to your business goals.
Your company’s growth in the past should help you make realistic predictions about future growth and give you an idea of what looks healthy for you.
Why Are Growth Metrics Important?
Consistently measuring your company’s growth is an excellent way to prevent any hiccups with your bottom line. Knowing that you’re bringing in profit is fine, but predicting trends in your customer base by monitoring client behavior will help you stay ahead of your competitors. Analyzing growth metrics allows you to understand better what the future holds for your company.
With the information you collect, your teams can make data-driven decisions to improve the quality of your offerings, market to the right audiences, increase customer satisfaction, and increase customer retention.
Track Revenue Growth
Monitoring revenue increases or decreases for specific products and services allows you to see which areas of your business bring in the most money. If a product or service costs more than you see in returns, you can change or eliminate it and focus on the areas that positively impact your bottom line.
Know Which Channels Have Growth Potential
Not only do growth metrics shed light on successful products and services, but they also highlight where and to whom you should be advertising. There’s nothing better for a growing business than to learn that they have a largely untapped market.
By monitoring your customers’ details with tools like Kissmetrics’ person profiles, you can draw insights about their demographics and form new marketing strategies to continue your company’s growth.
Find Weak Links
Finding areas of your business that stop growth is just as important as exploring the places where growth can flourish. If you notice that you’re getting poor reviews noting that your staff can’t keep up with service requests for your products, that’s an indication that your customer service department is hindering your growth.
They may be the reason you don’t have more returning customers or why you aren’t attracting as many new customers as you’d hoped. This provides an actionable goal: hire more team members and thus reduce the weak link.
Determine Your Business’s Health
A growing business is a healthy business. Growth metrics help you analyze whether or not your business is growing and by how much over a specified timeframe. If your company is growing at a slower rate than your competitors, that’s likely a sign that you need to be doing something differently.
Stagnant or declining businesses are usually a sign that trouble is just around the corner, so you must stay on top of growth metrics to learn about problems as soon as they arise.
Measure ROI
Growth metrics measure ROI and can differentiate between campaigns. Kissmetrics offers the ability to track campaigns by issuing multiple URLs for social media posts and drip email campaigns. By measuring your ROI, you can see which avenues lead to company growth so that you can pursue them and not waste your time in other marketing efforts.
How Do I Know Which Growth Metrics to Track?
Determining the right growth metrics depends on your industry and business model. For example, e-commerce companies and SaaS companies will likely track somewhat different metrics. The number of subscriptions is a metric that only applies to businesses with a subscription model.
The best growth metrics are the ones that contribute clear and relevant information that pertains to your business goals. Once you have created your KPIs and know how you measure your business’s success, you’ll be able to find the metrics that give you the information you need.
What Are the Most Important Metrics for Product Performance?
Your growth analytics, or growth KPIs, depend on your business goals and what you want to achieve. Choosing those KPIs may not look the same for every company, but everyone should be watching a few essential KPIs.
Sales Revenue
Sales revenue may be the most basic metric of all, but undoubtedly one of the most important. Your sales revenue ought to increase with each successive year. However, many external factors can affect your revenue.
If your sales revenue isn’t growing according to your expectations, then you may need to realign the company with your business goals. Tracking your revenue from year to year can help you create realistic goals for the future or see if there is a serious problem within your business that needs assistance.
Customer Acquisition Costs
Customer acquisition costs measure how much you need to spend on a single new customer to get them to convert to your brand. Knowing how much it costs to generate a lead is essential when calculating profits or customer lifetime value. Once you know how much a lead costs, you’ll need to factor in the conversion rate.
After all, you’ll likely need multiple leads to generate a single new customer. That customer may increase your revenue, but they’ll need to improve it enough to outweigh what you paid to attract them in the first place.
Customer Churn
Customer churn shows the percentage of clients who stop doing business with you. This may be unsubscribing to your service or not purchasing any more of your products. Though customer churn can happen for various reasons, a high churn rate often indicates that something is wrong with your products or services.
Customer Engagement
Understanding how your customers use your products or services is crucial when determining which features you should focus on for future releases. Suppose customers all want to use one specific feature on your website. In that case, that is a signal that your company should explore potential growth within that feature by expanding its scope or improving its performance.
Similarly, measuring the number of active users is an essential growth metric. Ideally, your number of active users should increase as your brand awareness grows, so if it stays steady, that’s a sign that something isn’t working properly.
Customer Retention
Customer acquisition costs are often decreased as companies perfect their marketing techniques, but they’re still expensive. Retaining existing customers is always cheaper than attracting new ones.
Measuring the percentage of your customers who come back for more can provide valuable insight into customer satisfaction with your products or services. Customers with positive interactions with your products are more likely to buy future releases or updates.
Upsells
Upselling customers is one of the best ways to improve your sales revenue and reduce customer acquisition costs. When each customer, on average, is spending more on your products or services, you can keep a more significant cut of your revenue.
Incentivizing your clients to purchase additional products through a bundle or promotional offer or persuading customers to buy a more expensive version of their desired service is something every sales team member should aim for.
How Do I Track Growth Metrics?
Kissmetrics allows you to track important metrics for your business and generate meaningful reports from the collected data. Our reports are full of insights into how your company is growing and what is stopping you from reaching your goals.
Before you can get to the insightful reporting, however, there are a few steps you must take:
- Designate which aspects of your company you want to monitor – when you know what type of information you need, you’ll have a better idea about which metrics to track.
- Decide on how often you want to report on your metrics.
- Choose appropriate parameters for data gathering.
- Set up your analytics software and get tracking.
Conclusion
A solid understanding of growth metrics is necessary to monitor how your business is doing both now and in the future. It mighty not be as good as a crystal ball, but if you know where you have the potential for growth and what to expect in your growing company, you’ll be able to evaluate the success of your strategies and begin new initiatives with confidence.
Learn more about growth metrics with Kissmetrics’ comprehensive reporting tools.
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