A look at the activation metrics for Timely, and what we learned from the Google Analytics conversion funnel:
152 (56%) have tried the study (entering twitter account name) before signing up.14 (5%) have tried to sign in before signing up.
We lost 77 (28%) once we asked them to connect their Twitter account. We can’t tell whether on that page, or after dealing with Twitter.
We lost 27 (10%) somewhere else, most after successfully connecting their Twitter account.
The front-end for Timely is written entirely in client-side JavaScript, so to enable tracking we added a $.track method. Not that using Google Analytics code is that complicated, but we don’t load GA in development/test environments, so this method keeps us DRY:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | // Tell Google Analytics to track this path. $.track = function(path) { if (window._gaq) window._gaq.push(["_trackPageview", path]); }; |
To use the tracking method within a Sammy.js action:
1 2 3 4 | this.post("#/signup", function(context) { $.track("/signup"); ... }); |
We actually started out with a filter that tracks every request, but we do have a lot of personal paths (e.g. #/assaf/scheduled) and it made no sense to track those. Instead we settled on a bunch of paths — not always the same as the page URL — and we track those explicitly.
Combined with Google Analytics’ goals and funnels gives us enough information to figure out how users are responding to the service and iteratively improve the experience.