Making decisions to appropriately scale your business takes a lot of information and context. There are three main branches of analytics a company needs to consider when it comes time to expand and move up: marketing, subscription, and web.

Because these three categories measure different aspects of a SaaS business’ efficacy and efficiency, there is no single all-purpose tool which can, on its own, inform a company’s overall health. By employing the right tool to measure success, businesses can learn from mistakes and enhance successes for maximum potential.

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Why Use Analytics Tools?

An analytics tool is any program which offers insights into how a business currently runs. By looking at aspects like Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and churn, analytics tools can become powerful aids in informing major business strategies and can cause both short-term and long-term gain for a growing company.

Marketing Analytics

Understanding the efficacy of your marketing and customer outreach is essential for driving traffic and growing your customer base. Here are some effective tools which can inform your marketing tactics:

  • HubSpot: With CRM, Sales, Marketing, and Service capabilities, HubSpot offers multiple different data streams for marketers to tie together every interaction a customer has with a brand and translate this into tangible revenue. With a basic free version, HubSpot subscriptions start at $50/month.
  • Bitly: Though Bitly gained notoriety as a URL-shortening tool for links, it in fact offers a full array of analytics including organic link shares, clicks by channel and clicks by demographic. This surprising tool comes in a free version, or is available by subscription starting at $29/month.
  • Kissmetrics: Aside from offering curated marketing metrics reports, this tool affords its user to build trusted cohorts, funnels, and customer journey based on customer behavior. A step beyond Google Analytics, the pricing for Kissmetrics is available upon request.
  • Mixpanel: By analyzing marketing and the cohort, Mixpanel assesses how customers move through your product as well as your funnel and compares users on behavior. With the ability to zoom out and see benefit adoption at scale, it is possible to gain fresh perspective on your customers’ interaction with your product. After the free plan, pricing starts at $89/month.
  • Salesforce: Best known for their prowess with Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Salesforce also offers a tool called Einstein Analytics. Built with artificial intelligence, this product offers analysis of customer journey and basic metrics while allowing users to view the main takeaways of their numbers without getting bogged down in unnecessary detail.
  • Woopra: While this tool is not in every business’ price range, it offers tailored programs for product, sales, marketing, and support teams for a full view of a customer’s lifespan with a product. By analyzing how a customer interacts with each feature of a product as well as for how long, a business can cater future efforts to match and streamline customer support services. Paid plans start at $999/month.
  • Metabase: This solution connects databases and organizes data into charts based on granular questions asked, such as “How many messages per day are our users sending?” With this tool, the only limitation is your own creativity in terms of the questions you seek to answer. With the right thinking, it’s possible to glean some fresh and useful insights to your business activity and health. Metabase has a free open-source iteration or an enterprise version starting at $10,000/year.
  • Databox: Instead of attempting to cross analyze data from a variety of applications including Stripe, Google Analytics, and others, Databox condenses a business’ span of data sources into one dashboard. Like Metabase, Databox sets out to answer questions about your customers’ interaction with your business; you can ask things such as “Do our Instagram Ads or Facebook Ads have a higher conversion rate?” If you can’t think of a question to ask, don’t worry—they have a template library to jumpstart your thinking! With a free option, paid plans start at $49/month.

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Subscription Analytics

Because SaaS model businesses rely on subscriptions for their recurring revenue, full-spectrum breakdowns of trends and real-time data is essential for the health of the company. Analyzing trials or freemium models, churn, and inactive users are just some of the factors to keep in mind when getting a read on the efficacy of your business model. Here are some companies offering solutions capable of placing your finger on the pulse of your business:

  • Baremetrics: Aside from tracking MRR, trial behavior and usage, and other basic revenue goals, Baremetrics has the added benefit of paring your data against an aggregate of other similar companies’ results to see how you measure up. With this tool, it’s easy to see deep insights into customer behavior as it translates to revenue across the market. Baremetrics starts at $50/month.
  • ProfitWell: One of the most in-depth tools on the market, ProfitWell offers features such as trial tracking and attribution, segmenting data to pinpoint the source of growth, churn tracking, cohorts to boost retention, and monitoring engagement to determine which customers are likely to stick around. ProfitWell has a freemium option, but for those interested in the paid plan, prices are available upon request.
  • Churnbuster: This specialized tool focuses its efforts on preventing involuntary churn. By offering features such as tracking voluntary and involuntary churn, improvements over time, and assessing customer payment history, Churnbuster arms its users with the knowledge necessary to proactively reduce passive churn. This tool starts at $50/month.
  • ChartMogul: Connected with all major subscription billing services, this tool only requires you to connect to your provider before it compiles data into a report. They have previously constructed filters for billing cycles, plans, and more which help to make digestible pieces of the data accumulated. This tool also happens to be one of the only available SaaS tools with dedicated mobile subscription analytics. There is a free plan; paid plans start at $100/month.

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Web Analytics

Understanding how users interact with your website is pivotal to bettering your customers’ experience as well as cultivating higher conversion rates. For business models like SaaS which rely so heavily on their web platforms, keeping track of how your website performs is pivotal to company health. Here are a few web analytics tools to help your business succeed:

  • Google Analytics: Whether you are beginning on your analytics journey or are an experienced data interpreter, Google Analytics offers insights on most key metrics needed to gauge a website’s success, including behavioral engagement metrics like bounce rate or conversions and acquisition metrics like traffic. Happily, this user-friendly tool is free to anyone interested in improving their understanding of their business.
  • Intercom: Known for its business messenger, Intercom offers an array of essential customer data including length of time since signup, recent activity, monthly spending trends, and more. These features dive deep into a business’ demographic allowing them to filter, segment, and target customers based on real data. Plans start at $39/month.
  • Crazy Egg: This website analytics tool offers five distinct kinds of website analysis reports so you can better contextualize data and achieve a clearer portrait of the lifecycle of your customers. This tool also provides key insight into which elements on your webpage are engaged with the most by your customers. The five reports are as follows:
    • Heatmap: This shows at what frequency visitors click on a landing page, and where
    • Confetti Report: This offers information about individual visitors and breaks click behavior into 22 characteristics for deep understanding
    • List Report: Emphasizing numbers over graphs, this report breaks down how many visitors click on any given element of your website
    • Overlay Report: This report offers business owners an analysis of user behavior for every clickable piece of their webpage, filtered into 22 different categories
    • Scrollmap: This alerts website builders into how far down the page a visitor scrolls before leaving the web page

This solution offers a free trial for 30 days; further pricing information available upon request.

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SaaS-Specific Analytics Reporting

Regardless of whether you are interested in acquiring analytics to satisfy personal curiosity or to pitch to potential investors, investing in accurate, thorough reporting is key to correctly determining your company’s health and competitive edge. Reporting analytics solutions should offer visual data sets to distill actionable insight as well as provide professional dashboards for your company’s reference. The following reporting programs offer SaaS-compatible solutions:

  • TapClicks: Through their two-pronged TapAnalytics and TapReports, this tool offers a sizeable suite of solutions accessible with a single click. This solution makes analyzing the efficacy of your marketing possible and has the potential to turn real-time data into polished dashboards and reports. Pricing available upon request.
  • Grow: One of the most thorough and trusted reporting tools for SaaS businesses, Grow offers financial, marketing, and CRM data sources with a tendency towards visual representation of data for increased ease of interpretation. Pricing available upon request.
  • Klipfolio: Connectable to over 100 different data sources, this reporting tool offers its users the opportunity to dig deeper into their data through 100% customizable visuals. This makes for quick, easy interpretation starting at as little as $49/month.
  • Cyfe: Using previously built and populated widgets for platforms like Facebook, Google Analytics, Mailchimp, and others, Cyfe offers easily interpreted reports through its “Starter Dashboard.” Its customizable interface provides companies with the opportunity to tailor dashboards specific to executives, investors, and independent departments. With a free plan, paid plans start at $29/month.
  • Adaptive Insights: Self-described as a “business planning software,” this solution monitors Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and offers its users the ability to plan, budget, model, and forecast vital SaaS metrics. This tool is based in the cloud, making for easy access, data storage, and collaboration throughout your business. Pricing available upon request.

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Data Analysis and the Importance of Asking Questions

Now that you have a list of tools to gather your data, it’s important to know what to do with said data. Gleaning the past through numbers is what we can infer through an analytics report; the analysis of the report informs us as to why it happened. Much of the tools listed above offer deep dives into your metrics so that you can make informed business decisions based on actionable data.

Moving past surface level data starts with asking a question about your business. By digging in and getting curious about how things are working “behind the scenes,” you can run your business successfully and sustainably in the long-term.

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Conclusion

Taking the time to analyze data can mark the turning point between a surviving business and a thriving one. When a business owner takes the time to interpret the health of their business through a multitude of different channels and data sources, they are able to see which aspects of the company are thriving and which need a little more attention in order to improve.

For analytics reporting tools that are interactive, it is important to play with the data and seek out fresh perspectives and insights on key facets of running your business, such as MRR, churn, customer conversion, and more. Keeping tabs on how your business is performing on every platform is pivotal not only to immediate health of finances but for long-term growth as well.

The most important thing a business owner can do is get curious about their business—what leads to success, and what doesn’t work so well. Data analysis allows us to rise above reactive decisions and pave the road to our higher goals.