How to Create a Measurement Plan for Your Product

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What is a measurement plan?  

Super good question! A measurement plan is a document that defines your business objectives in terms of measurable activities. It helps in implementing analytics tools to track the data you need to not only improve your product but also your marketing efforts.

When implementing any digital analytics tool, it is necessary that you build a measurement plan.  This plan should be shared with your entire team and also your clients respective teams.

On MarketLytics’s  larger projects, this measurement plan is also shared with the client’s marketing and development teams, where both teams are involved in implementing the analytics tool to achieve the business goals.

Outlining your business objectives – The Right Way

Any product or website that you launch, serves a specific objective. At the end of the day, however, the biggest goal behind any business, is to generate revenue. This is why it goes without saying, that it’s extremely important to outline your business objectives as soon as possible.

In analytics, the objective is defined as a goal. Let’s say you have a SaaS product, which offers multiple plans. In this case, your key business objective would be to get user sign ups and then retaining those users to continuously use your product.

This is the step, where you need to think and jot down your business objectives both in terms of product and marketing strategies. Because the analytics tool we are going to implement will be used for measuring those objectives.

But when it comes to SaaS business, the key objectives are a little different. You need to think in terms of revenue, churn rate, avg revenue..etc. Below is the list of major objectives for a SaaS business.

 SaaS Business Objtives

Figuring out marketing needs – And Who to Market to

The next step is to find out where your target audience lives and likes to hang out. ? You need to have a clear picture of the type of people your product is meant for, and how it is going to reach them.

Another benefit of setting up the analytics tool is that you can see which marketing channel is helping you get the targeted audience to use your product.

In a nutshell, this step involves figuring how to measure the performance of your marketing channels. The reason we figure out marketing needs is so we can best understand how to measure them our goal is not to find new channels but measure existing ones.

Choosing an analytics tool – Fun Stuff!

 saas analytics tools

Choosing the correct analytics tool for your product or website, suited to your specific needs and objectives, is super important. Since there are so many analytics tools, this might be a challenge, but if wisely picked, it helps greatly in tracking traffic and measuring business goals.

The best way to choose the right tool for your product is by figuring out the level of data you require and comparing multiple analytics tools that could get you the desired results. One of the advanced analytics tool used for SaaS products is Mixpanel. The other most widely used tool, is Google Analytics.

If you need help choosing between the two analytics beasts, we have yout you covered. Check out our detailed comparison between the two right here: Google Analytics vs Mixpanel.

If this is still not enough, I’d say, get in touch with us and let us help you come to a decision tailored to your specific business.  In this article, I am going to walk you through creating a measurement plan for Mixpanel.

Selecting events and people profiles – All About People

Being an event centric tool, Mixpanel focuses on tracking actions rather than pageviews. Which also means that it can help you greatly in understanding user behavior, by measuring user actions. Mixpanel also helps you understand who your users are by creating profiles for each user using your product. Pretty slick isn’t it?

Think Lean, figure out key actions to track and measure performance in each of these steps (max of 2-3 events at each step)

  • Acquisition
  • Onboarding
  • Activation
  • Retention

Create a new Google Sheet – Creating Things Right

The best tool you can use to create your measurement plan is Google Sheets. It’s easy to use and share with multiple people at a time. All  you have to do is to create separate columns for event name, KPI, property type, property name and implementation.

This list of columns can vary according to your level of implementation and complexity of the product. To see how a complete measurement plan looks like, check out the official template by Mixpanel.

 measurement plan template

Now, list down the actions you want to track and that you think are key factors to measure the user behavior.

Think of all the information you want to know about the actions. There are your properties. The major one is user signup, either as a free trial or paid subscription. This will help you identify who the user is and where is he/she in the conversion funnel.

Implement Mixpanel – Getting Right Into Things

Once the measurement plan is done with, we can move on to implementing Mixpanel. There are more than one ways to implement Mixpanel, you can either use a tag management tool like Google Tag Manager, or directly code it, however, to move ahead with any of them, you need to be familiar with JavaScript.

Once you are done with the implementation, just execute everything according to your measurement plan and use it to mark the tasks that have completed as you proceed.

If you think you need help setting up Mixpanel or building the right measurement plan for your product, feel free to hit us up.

Conclusion

To wrap it all up, a measurement plan helps you find the right KPIs, helps you track user behaviour, and serves as a roadmap to implement the analytics tool. Once you successfully create one, you’ll be able to implement the analytics tools correctly and get the results you want in a clear and meaningful way.

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