Building Analytics Backwards: Identify Your Downstream Goals First

When start-ups try to focus on data for the sake of data, they often get lost in the, uh – data.

Trying to track without a purpose creates a lot of noise and provides too little focus on reaching your desired outcome and the data and metrics you need to get you there.

Think about a company like Slideshare. Today, Slideshare enjoys over sixty million visitors a month and is the most used presentation-sharing website - in the world. To achieve this, Slideshare had to isolate their North Star and then the downstream metric that would get them to this point. For Slideshare, setting criteria to track the number of presentations uploaded in a week had their team focus on improving that specific data point week after week.

So, if you are a start-up questioning where to start with analytics, the truth is - you should start with your North Star i.e., your desired outcomes, and then identify the downstream metrics that will get you there.

Scitylana: How To Build Analytics Backwards

You can’t analyze your data if you don’t know what you’re measuring for. You must focus your product development on the correct problems as you build. Prioritizing the wrong metrics or the wrong outcomes will cost you time, money, and progress.

P.S. Scitylana is analytics backwards 😉.

There are three steps to successfully build your analytics backward:

1. Determine your goals and desired outcomes.

Some of the early problems you might be trying to solve typically revolve around acquisition, activation, engagement, and retention. Figure out which part of the funnel you’re actively solving for before building any analytics. What is it that you’re trying to accomplish that will move the needle in a positive way?.

With your North Star guiding you, you should constantly be asking, “what is it that I’m trying to get my customers to do with my product?” Then, you can build your analytics to reflect your customers' interactions with your product and understand the context behind each engagement.

2. Determine which metrics support your outcomes.

With the knowledge of what you want users to do with your product, you now have to ask, "how will I know if I'm successful?" The metrics you choose are essential for evaluating the success of your product changes and experiments..

Take Facebook for example. Early on Facebook determined that they needed to get their users to invite friends before they saw value in the platform. They needed friends that would add and interact with content before Facebook became useful. Facebook surely propped up analytics that would help them determine if their experiments to help users connect with more friends were working or not.

Bottom line, delivering the right experiences to your customers drives growth, profits, and revenue.  Isolating the right behavioral data to deliver the experiences your users want will help you scale faster.

Collecting the right metrics — the ones that reflect your progress toward your goals — will determine if changes to features or experiments are, in fact, as you theorized correct for your product and users’ experience.

3. Be tactical.

You know what your user is doing with your product and what to measure. Now the question is, “how do I get those measurements set up?”

Once you have your outcome and the downstream metrics to get you there, you need the data to support the metrics - this is where building with Freshpaint can help!

Freshpaint automatically captures and sends customer behavioral data from your site or app to your product analytics, onboarding, and engagement tools. So, once you’ve identified your North Star goals, Freshpaint helps you set up the customer data infrastructure you need without a heavy engineering lift.

Next Steps: Building Your Analytics With Freshpaint

For start-ups ready to dig into analytics, Freshpaint’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) provides you with the essential outcome- or engagement-based information about your users and allows you to integrate numerous analytics and marketing tools in a single place.

Freshpaint captures user actions on your site and sends that data to more than one hundred tools in your tech stack. This helps you get product insights faster, make data-driven decisions, and offer excellent customer experiences.

Freshpaint saves dev time by capturing user actions without the need to write code. This helps companies scale by building the data infrastructure so:

• Engineers can focus on customer facing features
• Product managers make informed decisions
• Marketing teams can deliver timely touchpoints

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