Essential Real-Time Analytics KPI Dashboards Product Teams Need

Product teams live and die by their ability to craft a seamless customer experience. Brands can spend months agonizing over every detail of their product and fine-tuning it before launch. But if they can’t easily monitor users’ behavior in real-time, brands miss out on opportunities to optimize customer satisfaction.

A Harvard Business Review survey found that 58% of executives believe a focus on user engagement is the top indicator of a digital product’s long-term success. Yet almost 40% of those executives cited a lack of centralized data and analytics capabilities as key challenges.

Traditional analytics and customer feedback loops fall short of delivering the rapid and actionable insights that product teams need. In a high-velocity digital world, brands can’t afford to wait on data scientists to compile statistics. By the time product teams get their hands on a report aggregating pain points, users have already abandoned you in frustration.

Brands need constant visibility into how their users are engaging with their products. Read on to learn about six essential real-time analytics KPI dashboards your product team needs.

How product teams use analytics

User feedback is integral to improving your product, whether it’s refining existing functionality or launching new features. Qualitative feedback is helpful, but it’s often unreliable and underreported. In fact, a study on user behavior found that only one in 26 unhappy customers will complain–the rest simply leave.

Measuring what users do, rather than what they tell you, reveals a far more comprehensive story. Analytics help product teams in a variety of ways, including:

• Tracking all aspects of user engagement and collecting comprehensive behavioral data
• Visualizing end-to-end user journeys
• Informing decisions on how to make product improvements based on friction points
• Testing new features to gauge their impact on the user experience
• Performing funnel, retention, and churn analysis
• Segmenting users and discovering cohort-specific trends
• Tracking KPIs that are critical to a product's success

Why product teams need real-time analytics

Tracking user behavior is easy enough, but turning data into actionable insights is often a bigger challenge. Doing so requires stitching together massive amounts of data to rapidly discover meaningful trends that allow you to positively impact the user experience.

Unfortunately, product teams don’t always have access to the information they need to make decisions. According to a Harvard Business Review survey, only 14% of respondents said analytics are built into their tools and workflows. 

Product teams that don't have real-time analytics face several common challenges. The data you need might span multiple departments at your company, and sharing it could be a pain. Your team might not have access to a comprehensive analytics toolset, and trying to tack things together across multiple platforms will leave blind spots. Or perhaps you’re forced to rely on a data scientist for analysis and left waiting for reports.

That’s where real-time analytics can help. Real-time analytics platforms, like Scuba, enable product teams to bypass those obstacles and:

• Monitor customers' journeys and product interactions as they're happening, rather than after the fact, and rapidly improve CX
• Track new product launches and features in real-time, and detect any points of friction quickly
• Test and iterate using fresh data, drastically reducing the testing and optimization cycle
• Increase organizational velocity and empower product teams to make faster, more accurate decisions without waiting for external resources

6 real-time analytics KPI dashboards you should be leveraging

With massive amounts of user and product data available–and more streaming in every minute–it can be easy to get lost in a sea of unimportant stats. Dashboards that reflect real-time data are a critical component of a brand’s success. Product teams absolutely need real-time analytics KPI dashboards to stay focused, and these six are essential:

1. Customer retention rate vs churn rate

Acquiring customers isn’t easy, so you want to make sure you’re putting your best product and service forward to keep them happy and loyal. A PwC survey found that 32% of users will leave a brand after just one bad experience. You’re never going to please everyone, but spotting churn as quickly as possible is critical. 

By monitoring your retention and churn rates in real-time, you can spot problematic trends, discover why users are abandoning your product, and address the issue immediately–before your retention rate plummets.

2. Product adoption

Once a customer makes a purchase, you want to ensure they’re getting value out of your product. If they’re not, they’ll walk away. Product adoption is a measure of how quickly your customers start using your product, how often, and for how long. Brands need real-time product adoption dashboards to track the ever-changing product interactions–not a week or month after they’ve already happened.

For example, if a user only logs in once every two weeks and logs off after five minutes, they’re probably not getting much value out of your product. Thus, when you see adoption rates lagging in real-time, you can determine why your customers aren’t engaging and resolve the problem before they bail out entirely.

3. Conversion rate

For product teams, conversion rate cuts deeper than simply measuring purchases against visitors. It’s a critical metric to validate function, design changes, and guide your product development roadmap. The faster analytics can be run, the quicker product teams can take action to drive conversion rates. 

For example, did launching a new feature increase your conversion rate? If so, your users are showing you what they care about and where to focus your team’s time. If not, how is it falling short of your customers’ needs? Additionally, monitoring the conversion rate in real-time for certain micro-events–rather than a global conversion rate–can help identify bugs and friction points within specific tools or features.

4. DAU and MAU

Having a large customer base is worthless if they’re not regularly using your product. Daily active users (DAU) and monthly active users (MAU) are both common metrics, but it’s important to configure these KPIs based on a meaningful event. What sort of action shows that a user is engaged with your product? 

For example, a user viewing your site and skimming your homepage is mostly passive, but submitting a form or requesting a demo shows active engagement. By keeping an eye on real-time DAU and MAU within your own product, you can make sure it’s sticking with customers and discover fallout and abandonment before they put a serious dent in your user base.

5. Cart abandonment rate

When someone puts your product in their cart, they’ve shown a significant interest in making a purchase. Yet, research from FreshRelevance estimates that online users abandon 59% of carts. Evaluating the customer journey before and after cart abandonment is critical to recovering those sales. Meaning, that catching points of friction, like card abandonment, in real-time–could be key to understanding why. For example, there might be a broken link or a site malfunction your brand is unaware of.

Examining cart abandonment in real-time enables product teams to see which features or pain points are causing people to walk away, and also what type of retargeting and post-abandonment triggers get the most customers back on board. 

6. User sessions and actions

Monitoring how your users engage with your product is the most important behavioral data you can capture. There are three primary metrics to monitor in real-time:

• Number of sessions per user: How many times a given user has logged in and used your product
• Duration of sessions per user: How long the users spend with your product in a given session
• Events per session: How many actions a user takes while they’re using your product

Looking at any of these in a vacuum is of little use, but even small changes in trends can be incredibly revealing. If your duration or events per session start dropping, why are people doing less with your product? If sessions per user drop, why aren’t they engaging as often? These are red flags to analyze their customer journeys and find out why engagement is dropping. Once the activity occurs, it’s already too late for product teams to address it impactfully. 

Elevate your analytics with Scuba’s customer intelligence

Leveraging real-time analytics to improve and measure CX is essential to your product’s success. With Scuba, brands can track mission-critical KPIs (and more) in real-time, through customizable dashboards and no-code queries. Scuba’s customer intelligence platform includes an extensive toolset that empowers product teams to grasp every detail of a user’s behavior, as it happens:

• Self-service analytics that let you gain real-time insights without organizational bottlenecks
• Dive into interactive customer journey visualizations for a 360-degree view of how users are interacting with your product
• Build complex queries and dashboards without technical knowledge or resources
• Configure alerts and indicators to respond to changes rapidly
• Compile disparate data streams for constant access to fresh and actionable data
• Identify novel trends by sifting through granular analytics, like how retention rate is impacted for customers who access help features during their first week using your product

Want to learn more about how Scuba can maximize your team's analytics? Request a demo today or talk to a Scuba expert.