teozilla: The Top 5 Kissmetrics Reports Every SaaS Marketer Needs

Today’s SaaS marketers face many challenges. Their job, of course, is to spread awareness and drive customer acquisition.

On top of these difficult tasks, marketers are always under pressure to improve their numbers and performance. You’ve got a 3% conversion rate? Great, how do you double that in the next month?

Kissmetrics is here to help marketers. Our reports enable marketers to track and analyze their online marketing campaigns. Today’s post describes five Kissmetrics reports every SaaS marketer needs.

These reports will help you track your marketing performance and provide you with guidance on what is holding back your growth.

Signup Funnel – Increase Conversions by Finding Where Visitors Drop Off

If you’re not using a signup funnel, you’re really missing out on very important data.

Every SaaS product has a set of steps visitors need to go through before they can become customers. Here are the typical steps:

Visitors need to visit the site
They need to sign up for a trial
They need to start using the product
They need to upgrade to paying once the trial is complete

Visitors can take actions in between the steps (such as visiting pricing page, about page, etc.), but those actions are not necessary to get to the next step.

A Funnel Report helps marketers identify where visitors are dropping off in their funnel. Here’s how a funnel looks:

This shows us that 3% of visitors convert to signing up for a trial. To improve on that, we can do some data digging and try to get more traffic to our site from the channels that deliver the most signups. We can also run some A/B tests to determine which offers and calls-to-action attract the most people to sign up.

2) A/B Test Report – See How an A/B Test Impacts Your Entire Funnel

Kissmetrics has an awesome report called the A/B Test Report. It allows you to run an A/B Test and see how the variants impact your entire funnel. You can still set up your tests in Optimizely, VWO, or whatever tool you prefer. But after you set them up, use Kissmetrics to see how each variant page impacts your funnel.

It’s really easy. All you have to do is pick your conversion event and the experiment.

The conversion event is an action you want your visitor to take. You can pick any part of your funnel, or any part outside your funnel. As long as you’re tracking it, you can test for that outcome.

Want to see if a homepage headline test moved the needle at the bottom line? No problem, just set the bottom-line conversion (for example “Billed”) as your conversion event, and get your answer in less than 10 seconds.

The A/B Test Report can also save you from false positives. You may run a test or a variant that gets more free trial signups, but loses further on down the funnel, where it matters more. If you were not using the A/B Test Report, you would launch a losing variant to all your visitors, and it would actually hurt your business!

3) Cohort Report – Track Acquisition and Retention Performance

A Cohort Report puts people into groups and tracks their behavior over time. This makes it very useful for tracking acquisition and retention. If you’re in SaaS, you need to track login retention with the Kissmetrics Cohort Report. This will help you compare your marketing campaigns and see which campaign or promo had the best effect on retention.

Don’t stop at just sign-up rates and call it a day. Look at how engaged your users are after they sign up. A login retention cohort report can do that for you.

Here’s how it looks in Kissmetrics:

On the left side, we see each marketing channel and the number of people from that channel who have logged in. On the right, we see the retention we get from each marketing channel. The higher the number, the better the retention. The better the retention we get from a specific channel, the more money/effort we should funnel into acquiring customers from that channel.

4) People Search – Find Signed Up But Unengaged Customers

As a marketer, you need to deliver more than signups. You need to deliver customers. Signups are great, but if they don’t use your product, they are no more useful than people who do not sign up. You have no chance of being paid for your product. To help you find these unengaged free trial users, you can use the Kissmetrics People Search.

The People Search lets you find users who share a certain behavior. In our case, we’ll want to find the people who have signed up but not logged in. Here’s how our criteria is set in People Search:

This will show us the people who fit this criteria in the past 7 days. We’ll add more data to our search by requesting when they signed up. We’ll click Search and get our list:

And we get a list of people who have signed up but not logged in.

We need to figure out why these people aren’t using our product. They’ve shown interest by signing up, but they aren’t using it. The best next step is to email each of them a personal email and find out why they haven’t logged in.

You aren’t limited to using login as your engagement metric. As long as you’re tracking an action/event, you can find the people. Here are a few other ideas:

People who have signed up, logged in, but not used a feature
People who have signed up, logged in, but not taken some key action you want them to take
People who have signed up, logged in, and viewed a support article (these people need help)
People who have signed up, logged in, and submitted multiple support tickets

Again, as long as you’re tracking an action/event, you can find the people who have, and have not, taken/triggered the action/event.

5) Revenue Report – Know Where Your Most Valuable Customers Are Coming From

The Kissmetrics Revenue Report is just what it sounds like. It reports your revenue, giving you various metrics that can help you build a more efficient marketing operation.

Viewed as a whole, your revenue is just one number, much like your traffic. You can’t get a lot of insight from looking at a number. With the Kissmetrics Revenue Report, you can break up your revenue into groups (called segments) based on anything you wish. If you’re a marketer, you’d segment by marketing channel. Here’s how it looks:

We’re looking at the “first ever” marketing channel. This basically tells Kissmetrics to segment people by their first channel. So if a person first came to your site via an organic search, they’d be put in the Organic segment. If they came from a social site, they’d be put in the Social segment. The None segment is for people who do not meet any criteria for the other channels.

This data shows you how each of your marketing channels are performing. A channel may perform better at acquisition, but if you’re not using the Revenue Report to track how valuable customers from each channel are overall, you’ll be endlessly spending money on a leaky bucket. Your job doesn’t stop at signups.

When you know where your most valuable customers are coming from, you can put more of your effort and money into acquiring users from those channels.

You aren’t limited to segmenting revenue by marketing channels. Here are a few other ideas (which you would need to be tracking):

Subscription plan type
Referring URL
If you’re using UTM’s, Kissmetrics will automatically pick those up, and you can segment revenue by any parameter

Grow Your SaaS Business with Kissmetrics

Analytics is all about measuring performance. When you measure performance, you can work to optimize. That’s what Kissmetrics is all about. We help marketers track and optimize their online marketing. Our Analyze product contains a suite of reports that help marketers track their online marketing performance. Our Engage product helps marketers optimize their online marketing performance.

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