Some of the cool stuff we do internally at Flowtown to keep track of user activity/metrics and iterate faster:
One of the biggest challenges of building a web app is knowing if your changes actually make things better or worse for users. Most people use vanity metrics to “feel” good about their traction (traffic, unique visits, conversions, etc.) There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but at the end of the day, there are really only 2 measurements worth knowing:
- Did your prospects activate?
- Did your new users come back?
Using a simple reporting tool, you can quickly see if people “got it.” For us, activation means: created an account, added a Twitter profile (and tweeted) in their first week, and if that trend (the blue numbers) is improving or not.
Having a baseline for your current metrics is just as important as measuring the impact of your changes. Before we build a feature, we always add the metric to our cohorts table so we can see how we’ve done previously. This allows us to learn (baseline) and improve from there. Since we write all of our stories in a“Feature X will move Y metric” format, we need to get our baseline for Y. Having a simple framework in place makes it easy to review a feature’s relevance and ultimate impact.
