Yes, metrics matter. In particular, product usage metrics can be an absolute game changer for your SaaS product, especially if you’re taking a product-led approach.
With a huge shift towards product-led success, discovering the way your customers use your product is one of the best ways to make improvements that will actually make a difference. Through product usage data, you can improve your product performance, increase customer engagement, and ultimately maximize customer retention.
So, what exactly are the product usage metrics you should be looking out for? And what’s the best way to measure these all in one place? We’ll cover this and more, including:
- What is Product Usage?
- Most important Product Metrics to Monitor
- Why Track Product Usage?
- How to track Product Usage?
- Grow your SaaS by Improving your Product
What is Product Usage?
Product usage is data that shows exactly how your customers are using and interacting with your product. Through this quantitative data, your product teams get an accurate picture of your current product’s performance and a better understanding of your customers.
You can use this product usage data in many areas of your business, but primarily, this data is used to improve your product. In fact, product usage of SaaS is crucial for product-led businesses that are looking to improve their overall product success.
Most important Product Metrics to Monitor
There are loads of product metrics you can monitor to better understand your customers and the way they interact with your product. However, these are the ones we recommend to get a well-rounded insight into your users’ usage.
Product Activation rate
The product activation rate is where users get value from your product, usually by actively using your product. The product activation rate is calculated as a percentage using the following formula:
Have a low product activation rate? That might mean your users aren’t finding the value in your product quickly enough. You might need to optimize your onboarding process to increase engagement.
Onboarding Engagement
Monitoring onboarding engagement is a crucial metric that uncovers a whole load of information about your customers. It essentially allows you to track the level of engagement of each user when they go through the various stages of your onboarding.
There are different ways you can track this, such as calculating the percentage of users who complete the onboarding, the average number of tasks completed within the onboarding process, or the average time it takes for a user to complete a stage of the onboarding.
You can also use product flows to identify the exact stages of your onboarding where users encounter an obstacle and solve these areas to increase onboarding completion and efficiency.
Time-To-Value (TTV)
Time to value (TTV) is the time your customers take to fall in love with your product or reach the ‘aha moment’. You want to reduce this value as much as possible. If you have a higher TTV, it may indicate that your onboarding isn’t as effective as it needs to be.
You can improve your TTV by reading this article on how to create the ultimate onboarding strategy. A low TTV will help increase product adoption (see what this is all about below).
Product Adoption
Product adoption is the journey users take to get from being a potential customer to becoming a loyal advocate of your product. This usually starts from the very beginning, when they sign up for your product and experience the ‘aha moment’, all the way to when they have a paid subscription and are an ambassador for your brand.
Discovering where each of your users is within this journey is super useful to help encourage them toward the later stages of adoption. To do this, you might want to level up your onboarding, provide a free trial of your product, or simply improve the product itself.
Feature usage
Feature usage is another helpful metric to really see what parts of your product are providing the most value. If users aren’t engaging with a specific feature, you either haven’t communicated its value enough, or they simply aren’t interested in it.
You can also identify usage patterns to determine the different ways customers are using your product. You can then use this data to influence your onboarding and ultimately allow users to get value from your product a lot quicker.
Why Track Product Usage?
As previously mentioned, product usage data is especially helpful, as it’s primarily quantitative data that focus objectively on how your product is used by your customers. Here are some of the main benefits of tracking your product usage:
- Better product: Well, duh! You can use the product usage data to identify exactly where users are encountering the most amount of friction within your product. Is it a specific feature, process, or page? Whatever it is, you now know exactly what needs to improve in order to make your product perfect.
- Make data-informed decisions: With objective, quantitative data, there’s no room for doubt about where and how you should improve your product. By using some of the metrics mentioned in the previous section, you’re well informed about the best decisions to make for your SaaS.
- Higher conversion rate: You can use metrics like product adoption to find out the obstacle that’s stopping you from your users converting to paid customers, ultimately increasing your revenue.
- Reduced costs: With a better understanding of which areas of your product need improvement, you know exactly where your resources are being wasted and exactly which areas of your product you should focus your investment on.
- Improved customer satisfaction: With an accurate understanding of your customers and how they interact with your product, you have the data to enhance your product and services to their exact needs, boosting that all-important customer satisfaction score (CSAT).
- More revenue: All the above benefits – improving your product, increasing customer satisfaction, and converting your customers – are going to help increase sales and boost overall revenue.
How to track Product Usage?
A great way to track your product usage is by using a product success platform (PSP) like FROGED.
FROGED allows product-led businesses to track key usage metrics like the ones listed above, so you can optimize your product for the ultimate product success. You can customize the type of actions and events you track, so your product usage metrics are relevant to your specific business.
FROGED focuses specifically on providing more effective product-led solutions by segmenting users, so you can get even more accurate insights into user groups and create personalized solutions based on each group.
Here are the ways you can track product usage using FROGED:
- Track when a user visits a page
- Track when a user clicks an item
- Track when a user scrolls an item
- Track a custom action
FROGED manages and monitors your user group’s usage data so you can optimize other aspects of your product. This includes in-app messages, feature tours, and more.
FROGED also helps to optimize communication outside your product based on product usage, including behavioral emails and campaigns.
Setting up your PSP with FROGED is easy! Read this helpful article on how to track your users’ usage for more details on the different ways you can use FROGED to help improve your product and communication.
Grow your SaaS by Improving your Product
Product usage data is the most reliable resource to make the product changes your customers actually want to see. Key metrics like production adoption, feature usage, and TTV are accurate indicators of what areas of your product need improvement. As a result, you can save money, increase conversions, and make your customers super happy.
With a PSP tool like FROGED, you can further product success by segmenting your users into groups in order to personalize your product to their exact needs. Before you know it, your product adoption rate will be sky-high, and you’ll have real advocates for your SaaS product. Read this article on customer segmentation for in-depth examples.
Ready to improve your SaaS product? Sign up to FROGED and start your free trial today!