Product Analytics Dashboard: Which Metrics to Track and How to Create One

A product analytics dashboard helps you visualize user behavior, so you can make informed decisions on how to improve product engagement.

In this article, we cover the following:

• Why you need an analytics dashboard.
• The types of metrics to track in your dashboard.
• The most common analytics dashboards in SaaS.
• An easy two-step process to build an analytics dashboard.

Let’s get started.

TL;DR

• An analytics dashboard visually displays important metrics in your business.
• You need an analytics dashboard to get a sense of overall performance, enable cross-team collaboration, and act on real-time data.
• Everyone on your team can benefit from analytics dashboards, especially CEOs, product managers, and marketing executives.
• Three metrics you should track in your product analytics dashboard are product usage metrics, customer loyalty metrics, and customer funnel metrics.
• There are three common dashboard styles in SaaS – a knowledge base dashboard that tracks self-serve content performance, an NPS dashboard that tracks user sentiment, and a user funnels analysis dashboard to track micro-conversions.
• To build your analytics dashboard, first, decide the metrics that are most important for your dashboard’s audience. A single dashboard won’t work for the entire team. Then, build with a tool rather than from scratch. A custom dashboard is time-consuming and expensive to build.
• Marketing teams and sales executives need to track performance from every social platform, all website traffic, every traffic channel, organic landing pages, and content marketing efforts.
• Userpilot is a product growth platform with ready-made analytics dashboards. You can track feature usage, create user segments, and then build custom flows that improve user experience.
• Mixpanel and Amplitude are two other product analytics tools. They have in-depth dashboards that give you valuable product insights. Then, you can use those insights to build product experiences with Userpilot.

What is an analytics dashboard?

An analytics dashboard is a data visualization tool that displays your key metrics, ready for viewing and analyzing by your team.

Why do you need an analytics dashboard?

An analytics dashboard is essential to:

• Get a sense of overall performance and see the most important data at a glance all in one place.
• Share the dashboard with others in your company and enable cross-team collaboration.
• Detect changes in data quickly and act on real-time data.

Who can use your analytics dashboard?

When you build dashboards to monitor performance, you make it easy for everyone in your company to make informed decisions. Here are the teams that benefit most from analytics dashboards:

• CEOs and senior management executives

CEOs and other C-suite finance executives appreciate analytics dashboards for their transparency. They care most about growth and revenue generated. They can see this valuable data in a single dashboard, and then make strategic decisions based on what’s trending up or down.

• Product managers

Product managers rely on analytics to make product improvements. They’re looking to gain actionable insights that help steer the product’s direction – based on key performance indicators like usage data and retention.

An analytics dashboard makes their job easier when they can see the analytics data in one easy-to-read place.

• Marketing executives

Marketing managers need a marketing dashboard that helps them monitor campaign performance.

Their goal is to see how marketing efforts are translating into sales revenue. A digital marketing dashboard sheds light on what channels convert and what traffic sources lead to sales – which helps the marketing team improve campaign performance.

Types of metrics to track using an analytics dashboard

A product analytics dashboard displays relevant data to help you improve product performance (and customer experience). Here are the top three product metrics to track in your dashboard:

Product usage metrics

Product usage metrics help product managers see in-app engagement patterns. For example, what features do power users use the most? Or which ones are getting ignored? Where are users facing friction?

Examples of product usage metrics include:

• Product onboarding engagement rate: How many users are completing onboarding? If they’re not finishing, where do they drop off?
• Product activation rate: How many new users are experiencing value with the product? How quickly do they achieve value? For example, if you’re an email marketing platform, activation happens when users send their first email.
• Time to Value: Speaking of value, how long does it take users to experience value? When do they first start seeing results or the benefits of using your product?
• Customer engagement score: How engaged are current customers? Are they using all of the most valuable features? How positive is their experience?
• Product stickiness: Are users returning to use your product on a daily or weekly basis?

Customer loyalty and support metrics

Customer loyalty metrics help you see how loyal your users are to your business. It also tracks how likely your customers are to make repeat purchases.

These data points help you find friction and dissatisfied customers. Overall, it helps you to improve customer experience.

Examples of customer loyalty and support metrics include:

• Customer retention rate: How many customers stick around (don’t cancel) within a given period?
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS measures how likely someone is to recommend your product to their friends. It’s a good indication of loyalty and satisfaction.
• Customer satisfaction score: Do customers have a positive experience using your product? You can track this across your entire product and per feature.
• Customer effort score: How easy or difficult is it for customers to complete actions in your product?

Customer funnel metrics

Customer funnel metrics help you measure the effectiveness of your funnel.

It sheds light on where drop-offs happen in the current system, so you can make improvements to drive growth.

Examples of customer funnel metrics include:

• Cost per acquisition: How much does it cost to land a new customer? This includes marketing and sales costs.
• Customer Lifetime Value: How much does the average customer spend during their entire relationship with your business? For SaaS, this includes all lifetime subscription costs, including add-ons.
• Conversion rates → freemium to premium, trial to paid: How many new users are upgrading to paid plans during or after the trial period? For freemium, how many users upgrade from a free to a premium plan?

Examples of analytics dashboards commonly used in SaaS

Here are three of the most common dashboard types in SaaS:

Knowledge base engagement analytics

Many SaaS companies heavily rely on self-serve knowledge bases for customer support.

It’s important to track how users are engaging with your knowledge base content, understand where the content can be updated and improved, and which resources they are using the most. That way, you can do more of what’s working.

With a knowledge base dashboard, you can track the real-time performance of your self-serve content.

Also, you can compare usage data over a specific period with Temporal analytics.

Net promoter score analytics dashboard

Collect user sentiment data with in-app NPS surveys.

Then, use analytics dashboards to calculate your NPS score and view the percentage of promoters, detractors, and passives in one place.

The dashboard breaks up the total responses into each of the categories enabling you to see at a glance how well your product or business is performing.

Then you can investigate common user responses, find patterns in the data, and see the balance between red and green responses in one place.

User funnel analysis dashboard

Funnel analysis involves tracking how users are moving through the stages of the customer journey – from first hearing about the brand to becoming a loyal customer. It reveals how many users are moving through to the next step of the journey successfully.

With a user funnel analysis dashboard, you can see where users are dropping off in the sales process. Then, you can make improvements to the process so more users make it to the end stage – becoming loyal customers who advocate for your brand.

With Userpilot, you can create milestones and monitor users’ advancements toward them.

How to build a product analytics dashboard

Follow this easy two-step process to build your product analytics dashboard:

Set goals and KPIs

Decide who the dashboard is being created for. For example, are you creating a web analytics dashboard or social media dashboard for the marketing team? Or a business analytics dashboard for the product team?

One single dashboard will probably be unhelpful for your entire team. Everyone has different metrics they need to keep an eye on.

Start by creating a list of data points you want to track.

The KPIs you track in the dashboard will depend on your teams and their goals.

Build with a tool rather than from scratch

You will need different dashboards at different stages. If you start from scratch, you’ll spend too many resources building a custom dashboard.

Instead, with a product growth and digital adoption tool, you’ll be able to visualize data with different dashboards easily. It makes it faster, easier, and cheaper to act on that data.

Best tools for collecting product usage data and building analytics dashboards

Here are three of the best tools for building your analytics dashboards:

Userpilot

Userpilot is a product growth platform with ready-made analytics dashboards and in-app experienced builders.

Tag features to understand how users engage with different parts of your product

Feature tagging allows you to see how users engage with your product, based on what features they use or don’t use. It gives you valuable insights into user behavior.

For example, which features are your power users turning to the most? By knowing this information, you can build in-app product experiences that encourage more users to try those features.

Use heatmaps to explore and analyze your most popular pages

Heatmaps help you understand what actions users perform on a given page – including what UI elements they click, the next page they land on, and more.

By investigating your heatmaps, you can see if certain UI elements are getting missed.

Build user segments based on user behavior

After analyzing your data, you’ll likely notice patterns in how certain users interact with your product. For example, users who share a specific use case will probably use the same features.

To better serve your customers, you can use this data to create user segments. These are groups of customers that share common characteristics.

Once you’ve organized people into user segments, you can send them personalized messages and trigger contextual in-app experiences.

With Userpilot, you can easily segment customers and then build in-app experiences that improve their satisfaction.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a website and product analytics software. They have dashboards and reports that showcase key performance indicators like conversion and retention rates.

They also have user segmentation features that let you dial in on what’s working and what’s not within specific segments.

Mixpanel integrates with Userpilot. You can use Mixpanel to get a detailed look at your analytics, and then take action on those insights by building product experiences with Userpilot.

Amplitude

Amplitude is another product analytics platform that lets you track and analyze behavioral data.

You can break down customer data in multiple ways to recognize patterns in behavior. Then, you can use a tool like Userpilot to make those product improvements that are needed.

Conclusion

All in all, analytics dashboards give you relevant data that helps you make better product decisions. That contributes to higher conversion rates, more sales revenue, and lower operational expenses.

Want to get started with building a product analytics dashboard? Get a Userpilot Demo and see how you can track user behavior and build product experiences, code-free.