Top 20 Key Metrics You Should Know for Data-Driven PLG

These are metrics I track for PLG

Business Metrics

1. ARR & MRR
2. CAC LTV
3. Payback period
4. Churn
5. NRR
6. Expansion revenue
7. Free-to-paid %
8. Opportunity pipeline
9. At Risk pipeline

Marketing Metrics

1. Sign-up Rate
2. Growth by Channel

• Paid
• Organic

Product Usage Metrics

1. MAU & Last Login per customer
2. Core Feature usage %
3. Advanced Feature usage %
4. Number of Users %
5. Activation point %

Communication Metrics

1. Support Tickets
2. Top Churn Reasons
3. Top Upsell Reasons

Other

1. NPS

Our goal is to build a self-sustainable PLG-motion

The investment we poured in

We want to get a return

We were essentially a startup inside a startup

We tracked ARR, MRR, LTV

We tracked CAC on ad spend, op costs, R&D

We can calculate CAC LTV

But the most important thing was to track the payback period

Is the PLG motion sustaining, returning in a fast enough cycle

Does the PLG have a run rate…

Also, you have control Churn

And create energy for Expansion Revenue, more reasons to upgrade

This helps us track the NRR

Only a certain % of customers will convert to Free-to-Paid

Every week, we track our Upsell Pipeline and monitor our At-Risk Pipeline

List of customers we need to outreach and act on quickly

We also needed an influx of customers to sign up

We used Paid channels like LinkedIn, Reddit, and Google

We also received traffic from Organic channels like Google, Reddit, LinkedIn, Word of Mouth, Referral Blog

Check out my article on breaking down our traffic sources using ChatGPT

Anonymous visitors land and % Sign-up, so we a/b test our landing page value prop

Once customers are onboarded

We track the MAU and Last Login of each account

I have BI dashboards on Core Feature Usage and Advanced Feature Usage by %

I look at the number of users %, because more active users means more stickiness and word of mouth

I look at the Activation Point, how far each customer have gotten, and how we can nudge more forward

I wish I had a better overview of the communication with our customers

We are always testing our pricing, so it's important to Top 10 Upsell Reasons

We need to scale without putting too much stress on Customer Support — I am tracking support tickets, and patterns

Whether it would lead to Top 10 Churn Reasons or product improvements

Finally, I understand that NPS can be controversial

My take on it is if you are filling out an NPS, you might as well give us the G2 or Capterra review or give us a video testimonial

It's a powerful asset

You might know other people who are struggling with compliance

But you truly believe in us, you can help us amplify TrustCloud's message to everyone

These are the top 20 metrics I track to ensure

We are Data-Driven

We are operating on all cylinders

We are building a sustainable Product Led Growth motion

I write daily about PLG and Building in Public. Follow me at growthwithgary.com