Kissmetrics Overview

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This page will answer four questions:

1. What is Kissmetrics?
2. What can I learn from using Kissmetrics?
3. How is Kissmetrics different from other analytics solutions?
4. What should I be measuring to make the most of Kissmetrics?

What is Kissmetrics?

Kissmetrics is a person-based analytics product that helps you identify, understand, and improve the metrics that drive your online business. We make it simple to get the information you need to make better product and marketing decisions. We strive to make both installation and reporting as simple as possible.

What can I learn from using Kissmetrics?

Kissmetrics can help your business, regardless if you’re small and growing, or established and looking for more depth in your data. Here are some example questions our customers have answered:

• Which marketing campaigns are bringing the most active customers to your site?
• How are your different landing pages performing? What are their long-term effects?
• Which search terms bring the most revenue for your business?
• How far are users getting in your upgrade or installation process? Which step did they get hung up on…and who are those users?
• How frequently are customers leaving? Who are they?
• What do your converting customers have in common?
• Are people really using your new “killer features”?

Additional Resources

We’ve created infographics on how Kissmetrics helps you discover some key performance indicators:

1. Step-by-Step Guide to Determining ROI of Organic Search
2. Step-by-Step Guide to Tracking Paid Ads
3. Step-by-Step Guide to Tracking Social Media

How is Kissmetrics different from other analytics solutions?

Other analytics solutions emphasize page views or isolated events. That means they’ll tell you how many times a page was accessed, or how many times an event was performed. But that hardly connects the activity with who your customers are, or how they’re using your site.

On the other hand, Kissmetrics tracks every single time a visitor comes to your website, even prior to their signing up. That is, we can attribute their previously anonymous activity with their customer activity post-signup. This allows you to understand where they came from, what they did, and what ultimately led them to become a customer.

After they’ve become your customer, Kissmetrics continues to keep track of their activity and lets you see how valuable they are to you. You can segment your customers on any properties you can provide us (like plan level, A/B test variations, demographic information, and more) to slice your data and understand usage patterns and assess marketing effectiveness.

Kissmetrics is known for its simple and quick reporting. Once you’re tracking the events you’re interested in, you can combine them in our reports on-the-fly in whatever combination you can think of.

If you need to see real-time data, use Kissmetrics Live to see what’s happening on your site right now.

What should I be measuring?

The simplest way to think about it is: what are the most critical steps that your prospective customer takes between landing on your site and you making money?

You can go from tracking high-level funnels (i.e. the steps a person takes from first visit to paying) to getting into the nitty-gritty (i.e. each individual step in your signup process). Here are some common events our customers track:

Signing up / Starting to use your site:

• Viewed Signup or Pricing Page
• Signed Up
• Authenticated via Facebook Connect or Twitter

Getting value from your product

It’s not enough for customers to sign up or make a purchase, they actually need to be able to use and get value from your site. Whatever the core features of your service or site are, make sure customers are using them!

• Configured Service (so they can start using and getting value from it)
• Started Using Core Feature
• Successfully Completed Core Action

Starting to pay you (or paying you more):

• Viewed Upgrade Page
• Clicked on Upgrade Call-to-Action
• Upgraded
• Viewed Billing Info Page
• Billed

Finding things to buy and buying them:

• Searched for Product
• Viewed Individual Product
• Downloaded
• Added to Cart
• Completed Purchase

Losing customers/revenue:

• Canceled
• Downgraded
• Refunded
• Unsubscribed from Newsletter

In the end, it’s important to stay focused on the metrics that are most critical to the performance of your business – your Key Performance Indicators, or “KPI’s”. Becoming a data guru doesn’t happen overnight, but we’ll make it easier for you to get there. We’ve laid out some Best Practices for what types of events SaaS and E-Commerce businesses should be measuring.