Integrating SaaS Growth Metrics for Product-led Growth: Our True Story

Welcome to Part II of our series on tracking SaaS growth metrics. If you haven't yet explored the methodology behind these metrics, I encourage you to check out Part I. In this segment, we'll dive into the practical side of things, showcasing how Kyligence integrates and tracks SaaS growth metrics effectively.

Internal Challenges of Analyzing SaaS Growth Metrics at Kyligence

Every solution begins with understanding the problem. With the introduction of Kyligence Zen in 2021, we embarked on a new journey, emphasizing a Product-Led Growth (PLG) strategy tailored for this product line. While we've been a force in the big data sector since 2016, the launch of Zen marked a renewed focus on PLG.

Navigating the complexities of tracking SaaS growth metrics at Kyligence posed multifaceted challenges. With diverse teams like sales, marketing, and product, each having distinct data interests, achieving a unified view was no small feat. The marketing team's priority was to map the customer's journey, from initial touchpoints across marketing channels to in-product sign-ups and conversions, to fine-tune campaign strategies. Both our marketing and product teams aimed to understand the user's progression, emphasizing the importance of a centralized dashboard for easy access to key metrics and conversions. This would enable swift and efficient optimizations at every user journey stage. On the other hand, the sales team was laser-focused on identifying sign-ups with a high likelihood of conversion, making it imperative to integrate this data into our CRM for strategic engagement seamlessly.

However, the real challenge lay in the integration of each data source. Merging product data with marketing and sales data was akin to fitting together pieces of a complex puzzle. Sales data, often housed in CRMs like HubSpot, marketing data scattered across tools like Google Analytics and Google Ads, and product data, typically siloed in standalone analytics tools, made for a challenging amalgamation. This fragmentation not only made data accessibility cumbersome but also raised concerns about data consistency and accuracy. Addressing these challenges demanded a reimagined data infrastructure approach. We'll shed light on Kyligence's solution to navigate these intricate challenges as we proceed.

How Kyligence Analyzes Growth Metrics to Boost User Adoption

Having understood the challenges, let's explore how we tackled them and the tools that played a pivotal role. Here’s a peek into the tech stack we rallied behind:

• Product analytics: Mixpanel
• User onboarding: Appcues
• User Support: Zendesk
• CRM: Hubspot
• Website Analytics: Google Analytics, Google Search Console
• Metrics Store and data analytics: AWS S3 and our very own Kyligence Zen

Kyligence's Differentiated Advantage in Growth Metrics

One of the standout features of Kyligence's approach to Growth Metrics is the empowerment of our marketers. In many organizations, especially organizations with highly technical products, marketers often find themselves dependent on technical or data teams to implement and analyze their strategies. This is not the case at Kyligence.

Imagine this: A marketer spots a trending keyword. Instead of waiting for multiple teams to get on board, they can independently develop a landing page, design an onboarding process, and immediately access user data. Our centralized metrics store ensures that all relevant data is at their fingertips. But the real game-changer is our AI-powered tool, Kyligence Copilot. It provides automated insights, allowing our marketers to understand the reasons behind data trends without sifting through heaps of raw data.

This autonomy means that our marketers can quickly analyze attribution, understand what's working and what's not, and make rapid improvements. All of this without the need to rely on any technical or data development personnel. It's a streamlined, efficient process that ensures we're always agile, always responsive, and always ahead of the curve.

The Key Metrics Kyligence's Team Track

Metrics are the heartbeat of any growth strategy. At Kyligence, our approach is informed by industry insights such as those shared by Kyle Poyar in "Growth Unhinged" and tailored to our unique needs. Here's a glimpse into the metrics that drive our teams:

Growth and Marketing Team:

The growth and marketing teams lead the PLG user journey, focusing on user acquisition and engagement. They leverage various marketing channels and campaigns to attract users to our website and offer contextual content to convert visitors into product trialists.

Key Metrics:

• Pageviews
• User visits
• Sign-ups
• Marketing qualified leads (MQLs)
• User visits to sign-up rate
• Marketing-influenced revenue

Product Team:

The product team ensures an optimal product experience and facilitates swift user onboarding and activation. The in-product experience significantly influences the rate at which sign-ups convert into paid users.

Key Metrics:

• Key behavior metrics
• Free to paid conversion rate
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Sales Team:

While the sales team is primarily evaluated based on revenue-driven metrics, they also play a crucial role in the free-to-paid conversion process, a leading indicator of overall revenue.

Key Metrics:

• Number of deals
• Sales qualified leads (SQLs)
• Sales-assisted revenue

Customer Success Team:

The customer success team steps in once users opt for our paid products and services. Their primary goal is to ensure users are satisfied with the product, leading to sustained and long-term product usage.

Key Metrics:

• Net Dollar Retention (NDR)
• Percentage of retained customers

By understanding and monitoring these metrics, each team at Kyligence can effectively contribute to our overarching growth objectives.

The Need for A Centralized Metrics Hub

With growth metrics spread across different platforms, it became clear that we needed one main place to track them all. Instead of just using individual PLG tools like HubSpot or Mixpanel, our strategy focuses on bringing data together in one central place. For example, our growth marketing team relies heavily on the UV to Sign-ups conversion metric. To get a clear view of this metric, we needed data from both Google Analytics and Mixpanel, showing the importance of having a central metrics store.

Regular reports from our marketing, sales, and product teams to top management play a big role in our growth strategy. To make this process smoother and to make sure our growth metrics match our business goals, we introduced the Goal feature. This tool helps us visually connect key metrics with our business targets, making sure all teams understand our business progress and where we can do better.

Our AI-powered tool, Kyligence Copilot, equips our teams with immediate insights tailored to their needs. Take our marketing team as an example: they report on website user visits and sign-up rates every week. With the Copilot, they can effortlessly delve into the reasons behind any fluctuations in these metrics. This allows them to provide clear explanations in their weekly reports and devise actionable plans to address any challenges.

Kyligence Copilot's efficiency accelerates our daily decision-making process. Concurrently, the 'Goal' feature offers our senior leadership a comprehensive overview of our business performance in relation to our growth metrics. This holistic view is invaluable for making strategic decisions.

Kyligence Zen, with the power of Copilot combined with the Goal feature, empowers both our operational and strategic decision-making. And when it's time to pivot or adjust, Kyligence Zen ensures we do so with speed and precision.

How Data Flows

Understanding the flow of data is crucial. From tracking user sign-ups in Mixpanel to aggregating data from various sources, our approach ensures that every piece of data is accounted for and accessible. Here's a closer look at our data flow mechanisms:

All user sign-ups and product activity events within the product were tracked using MixPanel. The data was then loaded into AWS S3 through data ELT and subsequently into our metrics store, Kyligence Zen.

Website analytics data and search analytics data were separately tracked using Google Analytics and Google Search Console. These data can be extracted using the low-code data preparation tool, QuickTable. Afterward, the data was landed into AWS S3 to be sourced into the metrics store.

Data from both product analytics and marketing campaigns are aggregated on a daily basis, enabling us to calculate website-to-sign-up conversions across these two separate sources.

While the overarching data flow provides a macro view, let's delve into the finer details of our tracking mechanisms. Here are more details about our detailed tracking:

• To effectively identify the marketing channels and campaigns that drive user conversion, we have leveraged UTM parameters. The marketing team will generate a unique UTM campaign code for each marketing channel, and the engineering team has modified our website's code to pass the UTM parameters along with the user's sign-up information to MixPanel. This allows us to track user conversion and accurately determine which channels drive conversions.

• We have also utilized the automatic integration between MixPanel and HubSpot to sync user sign-ups and key user behavior flags to HubSpot. This, combined with leads generated through traditional marketing methods, provides the sales team with a centralized place to track the lifecycle of pipelines. The synchronization of key user behaviors in the product to HubSpot also helps sales understand what users have experienced and tried, allowing for better tailoring of messages to users.

• We are also looking to push our derived product behavior metrics to our CRM. This will allow us to gather compound data points that measure the user's activity in the CRM. Sales can then use this information to better tailor their sales activities based on the user's activities.

Summary

In the world of SaaS, tracking growth metrics is both an art and a science. At Kyligence, we've embraced this challenge, leveraging the right tools and strategies to gain invaluable insights into our growth trajectory.

For SaaS businesses facing challenges in tracking their growth metrics, we encourage you to experience the difference with Kyligence Zen. It's not just about data; it's about deriving actionable insights that drive growth. Discover the power of Kyligence Zen and elevate your growth strategy today.