James from Minigroup (https://minigroup.com/) came to speak at Hack Night on May 21. He started off with a brief summary of how Minigroup came to fruition. It started off as a social play site, then moved to project management and then to a social business-to-business social platform.

The goal of his speech was to explain the importance of using metrics. According to James, every company, no matter how big or small, needs to track data in some way, shape or form.

For his purposes, Google Analytics was not as in-depth a tracking tool as he needed. In order to get event-based tracking (specifically data on a per-person level), James decided that Kiss Metrics suited his needs best, helping him and his team to identify ‘power-users.’

But the question that James wanted to answer was, what is the real benefit of metrics?

He explained it as a way to convert more users to your site, to get your users stick and stay your users, because, through his experience, James felt that returning visitors were less and less frequent. To go into more detail on this, James found that a lot of people hit the sign-up form and 92 percent of his users were finishing the sign-up.

However, through his research using metrics, James found that 2/3 of the 92 per cent that signed up weren’t creating a group, which was the main purpose of Minigroup. Out of the 1/3 that created a group, 60 per cent of users created a post. This meant that only a very small percentage of users saw the true value of Minigroup. The solution, he found, was to walk the users through a step-by-step program, which made it easier and eventually habitual for his loyal user-base.

Later on in the process, James and his team found that it would be extremely beneficial to run AB testing, which was to present two different, for example, colors for his headings that his trial thousands of trial users would determine the successful color. It is important though to focus on a set of users that fits your companies’ specific demographic and psychographics.

James also explained the importance and value of lifetime customers. It is vital to the success of any business to consider how much money you are getting out of your customers because it will directly reflect how much money to pay to acquire said customer.

On a final note, James told the audience that using metrics does not guarantee success, but it makes life for a startup, or any business, a lot easier. Frequent testing with your target audience is imperative to the success of your company. Don’t always settle on hearsay, it can often be deceiving.

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