

Be a startup Metric King - mmenafra
http://klinger.io/post/72440546722/a-primer-on-startup-metrics-which-analytics-tool-to

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andreasklinger
Author here: Please don't growth hack my titles for your submissions. Thx ;)

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lukethomas
Awesome post, I think you should write about your Google Analytics setup. I
recently switched to Universal Analytics, and it's been quite a mess.

Also, I highly recommend checking out Chartio (www.chartio.com) - since it's
pulling everything from the DB, you can track and measure anything imaginable
([http://chartio.com/docs/charts/transform/formulas](http://chartio.com/docs/charts/transform/formulas))

My stack is GA for acquisition, Mixpanel for product analytics, and Chartio
for the stuff in between. It works well, but there's always room to improve.

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gk1
What issue(s) are you having with GA right now? I've done some advanced
configurations with GA and maybe can help.

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lukethomas
In a nutshell, we fire a server-side event when a user is created. What
happens is that we're using oauth to authenticate, which then screws up the
referring data. It attributes all signups to LinkedIn/Facebook, which is
wrong. On classic analytics, everything worked fine. Universal Analytics
tracks differently, so it's been a bit of a headache.

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gk1
Without having a full view of what's happening, my hunch would be to look into
these things:

1\. Channel grouping (modify how referrers are defined)

2\. Attribution model (eg, change to first interaction)

3\. Referrer override (specify custom URL to be credited with referral)

4\. Custom page path (on page that fires event, pass custom URL path to GA
instead of actual URL)

5\. Referral exclusion (ignore temporary stray into oAuth domain and continue
user's same session)

Hope that helps. If you could use a hand in getting this fixed quickly then
get in touch (contact info in profile). Same goes for anyone else with tricky
Analytics situations!

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kfk
Hi andreas, very cool post. I agree 100% that one should leverage his own
database first thing: those are numbers easy to truck and on which you can
rely on.

Since I am looking for to undertake a medium(ish) OS project in Flask and
D3.js I wanted to ask: do you think there might be a need for a good simple
app that startups can run on their own servers and can use to segment their
database?

I know there is a bunch of analytics platforms out there. I work in finance,
believe me I know. But I was wondering if there is any particular pain point
for startups tracking their db numbers that has not been fixed yet.

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andreasklinger
Totally. There is one tool missing:

A simple way to create own (database depended) dashboards. Most of the OSS
tools (eg [http://fnordmetric.io/](http://fnordmetric.io/) etc) focus on time-
based graphs. Cool stuff.

But personally i would rather look for a OSS tool that distributes also report
files/recipes that startups can share. Eg. Retention Cohort, AARRR etc.

If it would also have a simple way to add graphs even better.

I was actually working on this kind of tool but stepped above my personal
developer (skill) comfort-zone. If you want more feedback feel free to ping me
andreas%klinger.io

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charlus
I found this a great read and immensely useful, but the styling to pull out
words/phrases in bold felt really distracting, and above all unnecessary.

Though it might be Chrome on Win 7, which makes fonts generally look awful.

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andreasklinger
Thanks for the feedback

I need to get a new theme. Really unhappy with this one (and it's fonts)

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dhimes
Unfortunately, it is only/nearly only web metrics (he mentions accounting
somewhat down the page).

No discussion of productivity metrics, burn rates, etc.

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andreasklinger
Agree.

FYI: I mention it in the top as well.

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joevandyk
I'm surprised more folks don't store data about every page view/action in
their database. If you have a lot of data, postgres_fdw makes it easy to
scale. Analytics becomes much simpler if all your data is in a single system.

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andreasklinger
Agree

But to be fair: In my exp the timestamps on models are usually already
sufficient. In most cases you want to monitor state changes.

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joevandyk
Not sure what you mean.

Say you are an e-commerce business. If you store each page view in your
system, it's simple to write a sql query that details where all your visitors
are coming from, the path they take to order something, how long it takes them
to order something, which users haven't ordered anything or visited the site
in the past two weeks, etc.

Adding a timestamp to a table doesn't really help here.

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dimfisch
What about intercom.io ?

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andreasklinger
i usually recommend it in my workshops/talks/consulting

the post was already getting to big

i might will do a dedicated post on health dashboards - where they fit in well

