6 SaaS Analytics Questions You Should Always Ask

If you're a SaaS company, your website is everything. Your online business’s survival, success, and impact all depend on your domain. So it only makes sense that you learn as much as you can about it—you can't improve what you don't measure, right?

Well, to do that, we have to turn all the lifeless numbers that Google Analytics is shoving down our throats into meaningful, actionable interpretations. That starts by asking the right questions about our data acquisition, presentation, and approaches to campaign strategy.

So in this article, we're going to introduce you to the most important SaaS analytics categories, cover the most critical questions you should be asking about them, and recommend some great SaaS analytics tools like Churnkey to significantly improve your customer retention.

Let's get started.

What Is SaaS Analytics? And Why Is It Important To Measure?

SaaS (software-as-a-service) analytics tracks and reports a SaaS company’s online website data to help teams understand user engagement across all touchpoints.

Think about every time you and thousands of others visit a site. Every action you take is documented—from how long you're on there, how fast you leave, to where you're clicking next on the site (to name a few, more on it in the next section).

SaaS analytics are incredibly important because it gives SaaS business owners and teams critical insights on what's working best on their site, areas of improvement, and allows them to experiment with new strategies to improve our on-site experience.

What are the different kinds of SaaS analytics measured on a site?

Although we covered it briefly in the 'What is' section, you might be curious about specific kinds of SaaS metrics that really help SaaS companies understand their user engagement and website performance.

Onboarding Analytics

Your website's onboarding analytics measure how well you're able to capture leads (ex. through signups) or the interest of new customers (ex. account creation) visiting your site. 

This metric shows a SaaS company how well their site explains the products' features to new users and gives teams insight into where they can focus their efforts to improve the first session experience.

Here are some tracked actions that can be included in your onboarding analytics report:

• Free trial requests
• Total signups overtime
• Seasonal signups

Engagement Analytics

"Engagement" could mean different things for different SaaS businesses.

But it's important to note that engagement metrics aren't just about active users and sessions but also more specific actions taken on the site:

• How many users are opening your emails?
• How many users are clicking specific links or buttons on the site?
• What pages do users visit, and for how long?
• Do users share your offers or content on social media?

Engagement metrics give data-backed clarity on your audience outreach and engagement efforts. By looking at this kind of data, you can see what content and offers are working and which ones are boring users away.

Offboarding Analytics

Offboarding analytics measure how many users are leaving your SaaS product and if they're still engaged and interested in the long run.

These metrics indicate to a team whether you need more help educating your users about their options after any trial period has ended or what you can do to improve the site/product features that interest people to stick around.

Here are some tracked actions that fall under offboarding analytics:

• Churn rate
• Retention rate
• Cancellation rate
• Subscription pauses

While these metrics may be a hard pill to swallow, the best SaaS operators face these problems head-on because they understand how important they are for a healthy subscription business.

By implementing solutions like Churnkey, SaaS companies are improving their offboarding analytics with customizable cancellation flows coupled with enticing deals. You can stop users from cancelling their subscriptions and retain more than 30% of your business with such tools. 

Not only can you truly understand why your free trials are canceling or customers are leaving, but Churnkey also shows your best-converting deals that you can double down on. You'll even be able to dynamically trigger deals and interventions based on variables like lifetime value, subscription tier, loyalty, and more.

Offboarding prevention tools like these are a must-have in today's age, where customers have lower attention spans and are flooded with so many alternatives daily. But You can continue to supply them with the help of a service like Churnkey.

Revenue Analytics

The most familiar of the bunch, revenue analytics, are the metrics that every SaaS company needs to keep their business-critical path in mind.

By having your revenues quantified and tracked over time, you can see how much money you're bringing in on a monthly or yearly basis.

We're talking metrics like:

• Monthly Recurring Revenue Churn (% of revenue lost to cancellation/downgrades)
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
• Average Revenue Per User (APRU = total revenue / total customers)

By doing this, you can allocate more money and resources towards the breadwinning products/services and cut off any losing-money products.

How Analyzing SaaS Analytics Translates to Growth

• Uncover churn: Scope out where your worst churn is happening and troubleshoot the underlying factors. If there's a decrease in trials or signups, SaaS companies can predict a drop in revenue in the next billing period. By looking through your engagement and offboarding analytics, you can also foresee negative events that might occur in the future.
• Highlight your most lucrative features and most effective product flows: just like how you can study your most profitable customers, you can learn which services are loved most—why that is, and mimic the strategies and underlying principles for future offers.
• Segment customers: grouping your customers by industry, MRR, LTV, and even churn rates through SaaS cohort analysis can help you better understand their behavior and optimize your targeting and user experience accordingly. For example, you can highlight profitable customers with the highest LTV, deeply understand why they choose to stick around and use that knowledge to build more loyal customers.
• Track campaigns: your advertising and email campaigns are the most costly but worthwhile investments driving your growth. That's why it's so crucial that you have proper performance attribution for each one. SaaS analytics into your campaign gives you valuable clarity to optimize your campaigns.

Remember that SaaS analytics can only drive your growth if you can validate, organize, and use the metrics properly. So without further ado, here are the top six questions you should be asking about your SaaS analytics to ensure your data is accurate, meaningful, and actionable.

Questions that you should be asking

1. Is this data accurate and trustworthy?

It's always a good idea to conduct an analytics audit to challenge the integrity and quality of your data on Google Analytics (GA).

In the property settings of your GA panel, you can double-check the basics like if the default URL is set up correctly, whether your enhanced link attribution is turned on, whether you enabled demographic and interest reports, and if your Search Console and Google Ads integrations are linked properly.

In your view column, you may want to verify that all your tracking is turned on (e.g., eCommerce & site search) or whether you adequately configured your filters, channel groupings, and "Virgin"/"Working" views.

Additionally, keep an eye out for common tracking issues like:

• Are there missing/error pages? A tool like Google Analytics Checker can scan for irregularities in your data, which may indicate a missing page not being tracked. Ensure that all your web pages have your latest Google Analytics asynchronous code attached in the back-end.
• Are there data discrepancies between reporting tools? If you're in e-commerce, then you might be using a shopping cart tool, which may sometimes yield different data compared to your GA account. See that both their reporting configurations are set to the same time zone and time of day. And be mindful of canceled transactions that don't appear in GA.
• Is my cross-domain tracking activated? If you own two different domains under your business and don't have this set up, you could inflate your session count and open the flood gates to all sorts of data discrepancies between your domains. The Linker plugin can resolve this issue by including a special URL parameter to pass along the client ID for a user's cross-domain movements.

2. Is the SaaS data analytics meaningful?

SaaS analytics isn't just about tracking and downloading numbers to frame in your next PowerPoint. You have to question what you're really trying to answer. If you have the autonomy to do so, ask: "what does this mean for the business?"

Sometimes, you'll realize you can't act on some data. And that's good. By questioning the inherent value of certain metrics, you can flag other important ones for your business.

Take an A/B test of a tweet, for instance. You might post two tweets with different copy: one gets more retweets, but the other generates more clicks. Now, there might be several factors involved in the metric differences, and that's up to you to consider. But based on your business goals, you have to decide which micro-metric to give more importance.

If the attached link in your tweet was simply a helpful resource pointing elsewhere, the retweets might take precedence—as it's giving your Twitter platform more exposure. But if the link clicks lead directly to a conversion funnel, you might identify the clicks as a more meaningful metric since they correlate to sales.

3. How can we get more out of our SaaS analytics?

So here, instead of trying to handpick the most meaningful metrics for your business, you're looking at creating the most meaningful data acquisition flows. This is where you specifically manage and optimize events to have a great view of your customer behavior. In other words, how you mine the best quality data.

It's time to ask yourself the real questions like:

• Am I segmenting audiences, merchandising, and optimizing my campaigns?
• Do I have defined outcomes/conversion points? KPIs?
• Am I analyzing the right cohorts?
• Have I built data-driven behavioral personas upon which I can take action?
• Am I connecting different data points and sources to holistically study the customer journey?

4. Am I focusing enough on retention (as opposed to acquisition)?

As a business owner, nothing feels better than getting a new subscriber. But let's not forget that it can cost 5x more to acquire new customers than keep your existing ones. Not to mention that 65% of a company's business comes from existing customers anyway.

As tempting as it is to grow your customer base, don't turn a blind eye on your existing customers—instead, focus a healthy amount of attention on them. But how do you focus on retention?

See that your customers remain happy with their SaaS solutions, make regular data-backed tweaks, and offer personalized experiences, given that 63% of consumers will stop buying from brands that use poor personalization tactics. This is where a SaaS service like Churnkey is a god-send since you can create customized cancellation flows that really address a customer's needs.

Say a customer wants to leave because they think your service is too expensive for them. With a tool like Churnkey, they can select 'affordability' as a "reason for leaving," from where you can automatically send over a, say, preset 50% OFF offer for the next 6 months. Bam, customer retained. Both parties are happy.

And most importantly, you're showing that you listen.

5. Should I dig deeper?

If a metric looks questionable to you, question it. Why is the number so low? And, how can it be higher? Or vice versa. Your SaaS analytics aren't just meant to sit there and look pretty. Dig deeper to find the causes behind your customer data.

Is the bounce rate high because of a technical glitch? Are churn rates at record highs because of bad copywriting? Whatever it is, you want to know. And that begins by looking at your SaaS analytics holistically (not just individually).

If you're expecting an increasing number of new customers, but the churn rate is too high for your liking, that's a cause for concern. You want to know why they're canceling so that you can plan the necessary course corrections.

So when you're done asking the above questions, you'll start seeing how saas analytics can be instrumental in deriving actionable insights. You'll know how to interpret SaaS data and identify which SaaS metrics will help bring your business closer to its goals.

6. Am I using the right SaaS Analytics tools?

Sitting tight with Google Analytics will only get you so far. To be the best at understanding your customers and your site's performance, you need to use the best SaaS analytics software to give you the most clarity.

There are different SaaS providers out there with special benefits. Think back to the onboarding, offboarding, engagement, and revenue analytics we covered in an earlier section that you can measure for your site.

Well, you can speed up and simplify your data analysis in those important categories with these leading SaaS analytics tools:

Churnkey

Churnkey is primarily known for its best-in-class cancellation & customer insights. You can see how healthy your customer base is at a glance and keep a pulse on why people are canceling their subscriptions. Remember, you can't improve what you don't measure.

With Churnkey, you could retain up to 30% more customers by gaining clarity on their behavior and then come back with a personalized offer they can't say no to.

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg's SaaS analytics tool helps you understand how your users are interacting with your site. They inform you through different kinds of web analysis reports. For example, their "heatmaps" show you where visitors are clicking on a landing page and at what frequency. While their "scrollmaps" tell you how far down the page your visitors scrolled before bouncing.

With Crazy Egg, you can use your on-site analytics to make your hotspot areas more attractive and noticeable or improve the locations of your landing pages where users are leaving most frequently.

Hubspot

Categorized as a B2B marketing app, Hubspot is great for SaaS analytics and SaaS lead management. You can get valuable insights on how to optimize your saas website through their saas web analytics tools.

They stand out because of their saas customer relationship management (CRM), saas sales, and saas marketing applications that are all available on one software-as-a-service platform. Their advanced tools integration uniquely enables marketers to tie together every interaction customers have with the brand — and connect it all back to revenue.

ChartMogul

Founded by a SaaS analytics veteran, ChartMogul is best known for being one of the most easy-to-use SaaS analytics tools that provide in-depth insights into your revenue models and performance.

With this SaaS tool, you can automate the reporting of key subscription metrics (like MRR, ARR, Churn, and LTV) by quickly bringing together all your subscription data into one accessible hub. This way, ChartMogul helps you easily understand what kind of pricing strategy will work best for your customer base.

A Careful Examination of SaaS Analytics Can Help Lead to Business Growth 

Before you make any SaaS analytics decision, remember that saas insights are leading indicators of how your site is doing. So start by asking the right questions to validate your data from the get-go, then highlight the most meaningful metrics, dig deeper, and optimize your site and campaigns based on data-backed decisions only.

If you're using Google Analytics for saas data collection and analytics, then you're already on the right track. But if you want more granularity about your customer’s experiences with your SaaS website, then you'll need to invest in a SaaS analytics tool that offers the most data.

One of the most critical areas for your SaaS business's success is customer retention, and analytics tools like Churnkey equip you with a full suite of tools to keep your customers happy in the long run.