The 5 elements your SaaS product must-have

When developing a B2B SaaS product, we usually look at the short term: Growth & Revenue. We want to build features that move the needle, and analytics is not considered one of them. Analytics for a SaaS product may not be a revenue generator, but it will be the difference between a churned product and a high-retention one. Businesses look at their SaaS products as crucial tools, and how can they judge their value without trustworthy, insightful analytics?

To help products choose what to focus on, I summarised the five elements SaaS products must have within their analytics.

1 - Integrity: The data that you show must be accurate.?

Your customers want to know that they can trust what you show them. This means all data should be aligned across your system.?

The best way to gain this trust is never to lose it. You don't want your customers ever to doubt what you show them - Trust is easy to lose and hard to gain back.

2 - Performance - Make the data available and reachable.?

Let's face it, analytics is probably not the core of your product, and you don't want your customers to spend their time there. This is why you don't want them to wait for a second longer than they should. Think about it, would you wait more than one minute for a page to load? And if you did wait, would you feel like this is a good product?

Performance might be the hardest thing to achieve. It includes building the proper infrastructure to store your data and extract it in the most efficient way. However, many tools can help achieve it, like Appsolver, Looker, Metorikku, and many more. The upside is that reaching the proper structure can also dramatically save your cloud cost.?

3 - Benchmarks - Add meaning to your data.

Numbers are complex and don't tell the users anything if they can't compare them to other "Similar users." Let's take CVR (conversion rate) as an example. I am a user and used a SaaS product to set up a marketing campaign. I later saw that this campaign had a 0.9% conversion rate. What does it mean? Did my campaign perform well? Should I change something or invest more time in AB testing? This is hardly impossible if I don't have Benchmarks for other similar users that also use this tool. Like performance, creating benchmarks is a complex feature, but its added value is crucial and can be the difference between random numbers and insightful Data.

4 - Graphic visualization - Chart your data.

It may go without saying showing the users data in a graphic way will highly improve the benefit they will get from it and allow them to see the big picture.?

For example, if I see my revenues per day, week, month, etc., I can see trends, picks, and maybe even spot bottlenecks.?Yet visualization is often used only for basic data points rather than non-obvious data points correlation. This is where we can get the added value and strengthen our analytics. For example, create a chart that shows the connection between the user segment and conversion rate. Another exciting graph can show the correlation between the amount of CTAs (calls to action) to the CTR (Click-through rate).?

As these additions might not be a "Must have" in every analytics, they can take it to the next level and increase the stickiness of your product.?

5 - Action items - Make your data actionable.?

While as a user, it is great to see my data, trust it and understand it, if I don't take the next steps of doing something with it, the chances for me to improve my performance are very low.?

We want to ensure our customers have a clear, accessible action item directly from their analytics. This can be accomplished using the other must-haves we visited in this article. For example, if a customer has a LOW benchmark, I want to place a CTA? next to the Benchmark that will help them improve. This can be done by either changing/adding something or helping them understand what can cause this low performance. On the other hand, if I identify a positive trend from the different visualization, I want to encourage my customer to pressure it and maximize their potential by creating a CTA that will drive them to repeat the high-performance action.?

There are, of course, other essential features to include in your Analytics, such as digest email, self-generated reports, and dashboard customization. But they can be considered "Nice to have" and added after the five I listed in this article.