David Cummings on Startups

Product Engagement and Usage Understanding

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David Cummings

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One of the areas that I want to better understand is that of product engagement and usage metrics in the context of a B2B SaaS app. I’ve looked at a number of usage reports from Google Analytics and other apps but haven’t had the opportunity to see an expert in action combined with a system that adds insight.

Some of the product engagement and usage questions I’m interested in:

  • What are basic product engagement elements that every B2B product manager should know?
  • What are some of the more advanced techniques and best practices?
  • What metrics should be tracked daily, weekly, and monthly?
  • What are the best apps and tools to to track and analyze product engagement?

I’m confident that staying close to the customer is one of the most important things to do and understanding product engagement and usage is a critical part of this. Now, I’m interested in learning more.

What else? What are the answers to these questions and what other questions need to be asked?

Comments

3 responses to “Product Engagement and Usage Understanding”

  1. Tim O'Toole Avatar
    Tim O’Toole

    The best app that I’ve seen is Gainsight. They have a great way to not only track engagement, but also give reps actionable health metrics to leverage with their customers.

    Reply
  2. Juan Ignacio Onetto (@jionetto) Avatar
    Juan Ignacio Onetto (@jionetto)

    Hey Dave. Just sharing what we do and opened to discussion always for improvement.

    We basically combine different tools as you are stating at the post. We use for inbound traffic analysis Google analytics and also Kissmetrics because we always tried to centralize all the information in one place if possible.

    Then for the APP we use mainly Kissmetrics and we integrate it with Salesforce and our own database for generating very specific information that wont be available with Kissmetrics.

    Engagement app analysis we do it with Kissmetrics. We are able to understand inside the app which account drops off at which point of our onboarding process (we do online accounting software for SMBs so in our markets onboarding is pretty much more complicated than others like the US).

    Sales process and customer (paid accounts) segmentation we do it with Salesforce since we have all the information at that place.

    Regarding engagement we like to have insights whenever we lunch a new feature. We use inside app messaging and transactional email. We measure that by counting how many times an account uses the feature. Then we generate reports some time after and see the results. In our case we report to the board and we follow specific metrics, like amount of invoices generated in the system average across accounts, number of logins and total amount of invoices in the system. We report and track monthly these metrics.

    Finally I think that the term engagement really depends on each company and is up to each of them to define clearly what that means to be able to measure it and understand it.

    Reply
  3. Scott Sambucci Avatar
    Scott Sambucci

    While it’s not precisely tracking your product, knowing what’s used before your product is something else to measure. See: https://hbr.org/2010/01/the-threeminute-rule.html

    Reply

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