SaaS is a wonderful business model on multiple levels and managing SaaS metrics dashboard can help you cost-effectively acquire customers, manage recurring revenue and strong gross margins, as well as engineer economies of scale. To cost-effectively acquire and retain customers, you need an effective marketing automation system, which will make it easier to automate marketing and other key processes. By keeping the lead generation part of a cloud metrics dashboard in the Google Spreadsheets and configuring an appropriate marketing automation system, you can easily track the key metrics.
Managing SaaS Metrics Dashboard
Lead Generation Dashboard
The top your lead funnel, including the various core components form an important part of the lead generation dashboard.
This includes:
Visitors – Sales and marketing generates traffic to your site. The visitors to your site may register for free trials and possibly convert to paying customers later on.
General Marketing Leads – it is generally wide and includes social media, search engine optimization, white papers, general website tracking, blogging, test-drives, etc.
Paid Marketing Leads – the most popular here include pay per click, sponsorships, banner ads, and any other traffic source or paid lead used to generate traffic to the relevant website.
Sales Generated Leads – mostly leads generated from direct sales emails, cold calling, partners, and many more.
Other important terms:
Sales: this is for your sales generated leads mostly from direct emails, cold calling, partners using an email plugin.
Marketing: this is for your marketing generated leads mostly from blogging, social media, white papers, general website tracking, SEO, PPC, SEM. However, this excludes sales generated leads, testing, or product usage.
Paid: for paid marketing campaigns, including banner ads, pay per click, etc. All paid campaigns are a subgroup of marketing and should be tagged as such.
Under marketing campaigns, you’d often find these common categories:
- Google AdWords (including marketing, paid)
- Social Media (marketing)
- Paid Media (which includes marketing, paid)
- Blog (marketing)
- Website (marketing)
- White Papers (marketing)
- Email Plug-in (sales)
- Cold Calls (sales)
- Product Usage
- Partners (sales)
- Testing
For the metrics, the main focus is on Marketing Qualified Leads, not all leads. As you will realize, most individuals that become prospects are generally not qualified and need not be counted.
Defining your SaaS Metrics Dashboard
This section is the most useful for those interested in putting together a dashboard that will help them in managing their SaaS business. Ideally, businesses using primarily monthly contracts and are focused on MRR need a different dashboard from those using annual contracts and focused on Annual Contact Value (ACV).
Churn is a key element for success in any SaaS company, and this area requires deeper understanding. Cohort analysis is an important technique that is often used to gain insight. Cohort analysis is used to observe what happens to customers that joined in a single month. There’s a January cohort, February cohort, etc. It will help you determine how many customers you are losing in the first couple of months or know if churn has stabilized after a certain period of time. You can fix churn in the early months through easier onboarding, better product features, better training, etc.
To run a cohort analysis, you first have to look at the Revenue and the number of customers. Cohort analysis can teach you something different and valuable. MMR tends to evolve over time for every cohort. An increase in revenue from some of the customers still using your service easily outpaces the lost revenue from churning customers.
You can then apply the right objects within your marketing automation system (such as forms, emails, social posts, landing pages, etc) to report on the right results, then apply the Campaign through editing the object and selecting the Campaign from an available list.
Once the basic infrastructure is done, you’re now ready to generate your segmented reports. You can load your summary table from the Campaign reports section of the marketing automation system you’re using. And from the “Tags” button you can choose the “marketing” tag, depending on what you want to view.
Finally, you can customize the time period within the field “Date Range” and choose your date range for particular month(s). You can update your SaaS Metrics Dashboard Google Spreadsheet with data from your data from marketing automation system.
Load the Reports from the Campaigns screen and Set “Date Range,” customizing and putting in the right dates for a specified month. Then set the section marked “Tag” to “marketing”. You can view the “Total” row at the bottom part of the table. Find the “Visitors” column, copy the total from there, and paste the data in the row “Visitors” for the relevant cell in the most appropriate spreadsheet for that particular month. Then copy the column “Assigned Prospects” or its equivalent and paste this in the cell tagged “General”, mostly under New web leads.
To get key information on marketing programs with an expense, add “paid” tag, as this will blend with the tag “marketing”. From the row “Total”, get the Assigned Prospects and insert the relevant value in the row tagged “Paid”, ensuring it is for the cell within the spreadsheet for a particular month. Note that the “General” value under “New web leads” generally includes all Campaigns tagged “paid,” proceed and minus that figure and update “General” value (for instance, for a “Paid” value of 25 and the “General” 50, then the new “General” value resulting from the subtraction would be 25, which is put in the right cell).
Finally, get rid of the “marketing” and “paid” tags and add the “sales” tag. Then get your “Assigned Prospects” from “Total” row. Now plug this into the right row tagged “Sales generated leads” for a cell in spreadsheet for a particular month.
Conclusion
So, if it would take 15 minutes to completely update the data from the past/ previous month, for instance, all you need to do is set, on your calendar, a recurring reminder to help you accomplish your objective. SaaS is an astounding business model on multiple levels and managing the cloud metrics dashboard can help you cost-effectively acquire customers, manage recurring revenue and strong gross margins, as well as engineer economies of scale.Over time, your SaaS Metrics Dashboard will contain the key top-of-the-funnel data and information for critical analysis and review, and therefore, it is worthwhile to get some bit of work done, set things up and perform a proper configuration to make the ongoing insight, as well as critical analysis priceless.
