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Understanding your key product metrics and effectively tracking them is crucial for monitoring your product’s health and guiding data-informed decisions. In this post, we'll explore the top 5 KPIs you should track on your B2B SaaS product dashboard based on our work guiding data strategy for +100 startups.
The ideal customer journey is something like: Sign Up > Use > Engage > Engage Deeply > Retain. This journey informs the metrics chosen below, which help to answer these questions:
1. New Users
New Sign Ups (NSU) measures the number of users signing up to your site, product, or service for the first time.
This metric reflects customer acquisition efforts and market traction. It provides insights into product appeal and effectiveness of conversion funnels. It's also useful for identifying and prioritising high-performing channels, campaigns, and sequences. Ideally, your dashboard will allow you to break down New Users by origin, so you can identify high performing channels and optimise towards high-converting origins.
2. 7-Day Active
Next up for your dashboard: 7-Day Active Users. This quantifies the number of individual users who are active in your product over the previous 7 days.
It serves as a pulse check on user activity, offering a snapshot of day-to-day usage. It can signal product adoption, inform retention strategies, and identify spikes or drops in activity potentially tied to feature releases or service issues. It's important for gauging daily customer interactions and useful to analyse by cohorts to assess user behaviour over time.
Your dashboard should allow you to segment 7-Day Active Users by user type or activity level to understand who drives usage. It's useful to correlate this metric with new features or marketing efforts to understand what drives usage.
3. 7-Day Engaged
7-Day Engaged Users measures the number of active users who interact meaningfully with your product over a given period.
Not all activity equates to genuine engagement. This metric is useful to gauge how many users interact with your product in a way that indicates they receive value from it. It's usually measured through actions like using specific features or spending a certain amount of time in a product. Understanding your engaged users can help you optimise your product and find similar committed customers that find your product valuable.
In your dashboard, segment engaged users based on channel and demographics; build your GTM motion around your most engaged users. Establish clear criteria for 'engagement' to ensure that you accurately track changes in this metric over time.
4. Power Users
The next product dashboard metric is Power Users (PUs). It measures the number of users who use your product extensively and deeply over a given period.
Power Users are generally a subset of Engaged Users and use most of your product's features to an advanced level. This metric provides insights into the engagement and usage patterns of your most engaged and dedicated customers. It's usually measured through feature usage depth, frequency of advanced feature usage, level of customisation, and integration with other tools. Understanding your Power Users can help you optimise your product and find similar committed customers that use your product extensively.
5. WAU/MAU Ratio
Finally, WAU/MAU Ratio measures the stickiness of your SaaS product by comparing Weekly Active Users (WAU) to Monthly Active Users (MAU).
This metric provides insight into the effectiveness of recent feature rollouts, user acquisition strategies, and customer loyalty. A high WAU/MAU ratio is usually a sign of a "sticky" product, as a higher portion of the monthly user base is using the service weekly. A low ratio can indicate more occasional use or potential issues with user retention and engagement.
When analysing the WAU/MAU ratio, it can be useful to segment the data by user cohort, product feature, or customer demographic. This can help you create targeted engagement strategies and better optimise your product.
Together these metrics give an excellent overview of your product’s health. If you can improve these metrics, your product is headed in the right direction. For more information on >60 SaaS metrics, head to our Metrics Dictionary.
Now you’ve got a grip on the most important leadership metrics, let’s outline what makes a great dashboard.
1. Simple but not simplistic
Your dashboard should clearly convey information to your team without oversimplifying to the point of triviality.
2. High signal/noise ratio
Your dashboard should have a high amount of useful information (signal) versus less useful data (noise). The most common dashboard mistake we see is metric overload. Focus on a few metrics that most directly affect your team’s performance.
3. Clean, clear, and glanceable
It should be easy to understand the key takeaways at a glance without straining your eyes. This is key in reducing attention deficit and keeping your number-shy team members engaged.
4. Benchmarked
Viewing data relative to history gives crucial context, which helps you to understand whether a metric is improving or worsening. Benchmarking is also useful for setting and tracking goals.
5. Easily investigated
Great dashboards allow users to manipulate the data to drill down and explore different perspectives at a deeper level. This is important when you need specific answers to specific questions. Interactivity can be added through menus, splits, and filters.
6. Accurate & up-to-date
If you’re operating from a spreadsheet that’s updated once or twice a month from different teams, you’re operating in the dark and susceptible to errors in human data input. Having an up-to-date, accurate dashboard is crucial for fast-paced environments where timely decisions can significantly impact business performance.
7. Shareable
What use is your data when it’s siloed? Data is best used cross-functionally. Making your dashboard sharable helps to align team members around goals, keep everyone informed, and stops you sharing ugly screenshots in Slack.
What if you could connect your SaaS tools in minutes to get beautiful, strategic dashboards and a feed of automated product insights? Check out Calliper’s product dashboard:
We believe everyone should be able to leverage data in their decision-making, no matter their technical skills. So we made a plug-and-play business intelligence solution for SaaS operators. It connects to data sources like Stripe, Hubspot, and Mixpanel out of the box with no coding – setup takes minutes. It’s pre-built around the most important metrics for each department, so you can focus on metrics that help you grow. Unlike other BI tools, Calliper provides a feed of automated insights based on trends in your data. Check it out here.
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Understanding your key product metrics and effectively tracking them is crucial for monitoring your product’s health and guiding data-informed decisions. In this post, we'll explore the top 5 KPIs you should track on your B2B SaaS product dashboard based on our work guiding data strategy for +100 startups.
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