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What we've found is that different analytics services help us answer different kinds of questions.

For example, here are the tools we use to find each metric he mentions:

Distribution

1. New users by channel: Google Analytics Source breakdown satisfies what I need to know here. If you want to look at conversion to a Goal broken down by source, there's the "Goals" view in GA.

2. Total users: easiest for us here is to just query our database.

3. Cost of customer acquisition, lifetime value, pay back period: again Google Analytics if you're doing adwords advertising.

Engagement

1. Active users: here a tool like KISSmetrics, Keen IO or Mixpanel will let you see how many people are really succeeding in using your service.

2. % of users using top 3 key features in a given month: same tools as active

Revenue

1. Revenue growth: Stripe or w/e your payments solution is.

2. Conversion to paid: KISSmetrics and Mixpanel are the best tools to help you measure conversion rates.

3. Avg spend per paying customer: Stripe or w/e your payments solution is.

4. Churn rate: Mixpanel probably does this best, but querying your database might be a better option depending on how you measure churn.

5. Burn rate: your bank account!

What we've found is that no single tool answers all these questions well. Most companies we talk to use a mix of Google Analytics for basic stats and distribution measurement. KISSmetrics, Mixpanel or Keen IO for engagement metrics and tracking. Customer.io, Vero and Klaviyo for email marketing analytics, etc. etc.

<shameless plug>

This is why we built https://Segment.io, so that we could easily send our data wherever we wanted, and get the best analytics answers from many different, complementary services.

</plug>



<shameless plug> That's why I came up with http://www.instahero.com, so there can be one tool to answer every question well. </plug>


If you're sending payment events to Keen IO, you can build revenue metrics into your reporting pretty easily.

I also just wrote a script to run retention analysis using Keen IO funnels, will share soon!




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