With the new release of the web version of Bingo Card Creator I’m going to spend a portion of my weekend upgrading my internal stats tracking, which means “more stuff to share with you guys”. Do you have any data in particular you’d like to see that is not already covered on my stats page?
I’m thinking of tracking:
- daily signups to guest accounts, trial accounts, and purchases
- daily logins
- customer lifecycles (how long do people persist with using, how long until they purchase, etc)
- some light-weight cohort analysis
- most popular bingo activities among users
- most popular activities which drive people to sign up
Based on the list you’ve already got, it looks like you’ve probably already read Dave McClure’s presentation on metrics for startups. But if not, it’s really worth a look: http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-startonomics-beijing-june-2009.
I think you should also look at recording the revision of software that was running on the site when the customer signs up and when any particular “significant” event happens like when a customer creates his/her first word list. That will help you correlate changes in your metrics to the changes you made to the site. By revision, I’m thinking about a SVN revision number or a Mercurial changeset identifier or whatever the equivalent is for the VCS you use. Ideally, it should be a single element of data that represents the “state” of your application as seen by the user. Sure you could probably get there by meshing up the commit times from your VCS log with the times of events, but it would be much easier to do a “group by app_version” to learn that customers who first visited on version 87 were 15% less likely to convert during that visit than customers who first visited on version 85.
Mike McCallister
Mike, that is an EXCELLENT idea. That is so good I want to steal it and present it at the day job.
Patrick, thanks for being so open about your business and sharing all this data.
As for stats, for a while I wanted to see how downloads of your desktop version are split between major operating systems. Please share that data if you can.
Thanks!