That is, when you run a report and want to see only certain results, such as URLs that contain a certain word, you can use this feature to filter out only those results.

How To Use The Feature

When you pull up a report, you’ll notice that there is now a box directly above the report results. Simply use this drop-down to filter through the results.

Why Can’t I Do This With Segmentation Filters?

The segmentation filters (i.e. those you define at the top of the report such as those shown in the below screenshot) define the population you are running the report on. When you set those filters, Woopra extracts the segment of people you’ve defined and then runs the report on them.

However, if you would like to filter out specific items from the report results, you can now simply use this new feature to do so.

Advanced Result Filtering

If you would like to filter out specific groups based on sibling properties in an action, enterprise customers can build custom reports (e.g. you may want to run a report on page titles where the url contains /blog/)

All of the events, properties, and schema you would normally need to customize will be automatically tracked and set up through the plugin. This means you’ll have analytics reports, filtering capabilities, and more tailored specifically for e-commerce.

E-Commerce Analytics Reports

The plugin will automatically generate a number of e-commerce analytics reports, including:

Checkout Success Report

This report shows you the amount of revenue you’ve generated from successful checkouts by week this year.

Note that clicking on the “People” column will reorganize the report so that the chart displays the total number of people who have completed successful checkouts by week this year, rather than the amount of revenue.

Add to Cart Report

This report displays the number of people who have added products to their cart by day over the last 30 days.

Add to Cart by Product Report

From this report you can understand which products are most added to shopping carts.

E-Commerce Segmentation

Via the plugin, you will also be able to segment reports and build lists of customers based on specific e-commerce criteria, including:

• Lifetime sales
• Lifetime orders
• Cart items
• Cart total
• Wishlist items
• Wishlist total
• Added coupon
• Reviewed product
• And much more

E-Commerce Customer Profiles

Your Woopra customer profiles will show the activity of your e-commerce customers so that you can observe their behavior and better assist them.

In the example below, we can see that Don Draper read a product review for the iPhone 5, added the iPhone 5 to compare, then added the iPhone 5 to his cart. He then estimated shipping and logged out without completing his purchase.

E-Commerce Funnels & Retention

You will be able to use the e-commerce events that are automatically tracked via the plugin as goals in your funnel and retention analyses.

E-Commerce Funnel Report

For example, you could set up a funnel with the following steps:

1. Add product to cart
2. Complete checkout shipping address
3. Complete checkout payment method
4. Successful checkout

E-Commerce Retention Report

Similarly, you can create an e-commerce retention report that shows you for how long after a customer creates an account, they continue to come back to your e-commerce store:

Get The Plugin

To access the Woopra Magento plugin, install it – for free! – from Magento Connect.

Get The Plugin

The installation and user guide can be found here. If you need any help implementing the plugin, don’t hesitate to contact us at support@woopra.com.

You will continue to have the exact same functionality as before, but within a simplified interface that will make it easier for you to leverage your triggers for multiple purposes.

How Triggers Work

The Trigger feature will allow you to define one trigger and then simply select (using the checkboxes) which actions you would like it to set off.

For example, you may define a trigger for whenever someone signs up to your service, as shown in the screenshot above. Now, you can choose to receive a notification (e.g. a notification email to your sales team), run a script (e.g. a script to display a welcome message), or any of the other options whenever someone signs up. You will simply choose the actions by selecting them with the checkboxes and then defining them.

In the past, you would have been required to create a new Notification or Automation for each type of action. With this update you will no longer need to recreate the trigger for each action.

How To Access Triggers

The Triggers feature can be found by clicking the gears button towards the bottom of the sidebar in the Woopra web app. You can then select “Triggers” from the menu at the top and use the editor to define the Trigger.

Please see the Triggers documentation for more information on how to create your Trigger. Or, email us at support@woopra.com if you have any questions.

But how do you ensure that users do see the value so that they convert? Optimizing that critical free trial period is key.

1. Measure & Optimize Adoption Milestones

Begin by listing the key milestones a user should take to start seeing value from your product. Once you have that in place, measure the entire funnel to see which milestones are creating the most friction. That is, at what point are the most customers dropping off?

Once you know the main problem area, you’ll need to start exploring solutions to optimize it. Here’s a real example straight from us here at Woopra.

In order to use Woopra, you must add a snippet of JavaScript to your website or application, which allows Woopra to track your customers. We noticed that we had a big drop off at this “Add Code” milestone of our funnel. Once we realized many customers were dropping off at this step, we implemented a number of measures to optimize it, the first of which was sending users who did not add the code an email offering assistance and resources.

We saw results immediately. This single email improved conversions at this milestone in the funnel by 65% within just 1 week, which in turn resulted in a 65% increase in trial conversions.

2. Engage Inactive Users

Monitoring product usage isn’t limited to optimizing adoption milestones. You should also be monitoring how active each free trial user is overall. Inactivity is one of the biggest signs that you’re about to lose a potential customer as it means that the customer is no longer engaged.

You can remedy this situation by re-engaging the customer through a helpful email or by having a customer success or sales rep call them directly.

Woopra Pro Tip: Create a Label for all your free trial users so that you can easily monitor their engagement. To do this, you’ll need to send their free trial status as a visitor property. You will then use the filters in the Label editor to define the segment as “users who are on free trial”.

3. Be Personal

Trial users are new and therefore aren’t that engaged with your company yet, so they won’t be as inclined as existing customers to open emails you send or return calls you make. However, a personal message will go a long way in this situation.

In all of your customer engagements, whether it be an email or a phone call, make sure you approach the customer in a personal and relevant way. That means you should understand how the trial user has been engaging with your product, if they’re actively using it, and how they’re using it before you even pick up the phone or begin to draft an email. This insight allows you to optimize your customer interactions.

In order to accomplish this, customer-facing teams, like sales and support, require access to customer behavioral insight. Integrating customer profiles directly into the CRM the teams are already using makes it readily available and more likely for them to use.

Learn more about Woopra’s Salesforce integration

Your Suggestions

What strategies have you successfully implement to improve your free trial conversions?

But if you’re running an e-commerce site, you’re lucky – you can measure this data much more easily. Using retention analytics, you can measure loyalty in order to understand how to keep customers engaged and drive repeat purchasing.

Why Is Retention Important?

It’s always more cost effective to re-market to existing customers rather than attract, educate, and convert new ones. The fact that these customers have already demonstrated an interest in your offerings and are familiar/engaged with your brand gives you an advantage that you’d be mistaken not to capitalize on. The rule of thumb is that it is 6-10 times more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to retain existing ones.

In addition to cost savings, building brand loyalty among existing customers really means you’re building fans. And fans will evangelize for you in a very organic way, which ultimately brings you new customers. Keep your customers happy and engaged, and you’ll both benefit.

There are many different ways you can use retention analytics to measure customer loyalty. It all depends on exactly what your goals are and which questions you’re trying to answer. To start, here are just a few of them.

Continued Engagement

The most basic way to measure customer loyalty is to analyze for how long customers continue to engage with your website.

A simple retention report will give you the answer to the question:

After a customer visits our website, for how long do they continue to return?

In the screenshot below, we see that after the initial website visit, 51.2% of customers returned the following month, 24.0% the month after and so on.

Alternatively, you could answer the question:

After a customer makes a purchase, for how long do they continue to return to our website?

Both of these answers give you insight into customer engagement with your brand. While they’re not specifically measuring purchases, they give you an idea of how valuable customers find your offerings.

E-commerce sites engaged in a lot of content and social marketing will find these metrics especially telling, as they will give you visibility into the effectiveness of your efforts.

For example, a women’s apparel site invests quite a bit in social media and creating content for their website that defines their brand message and promotes a certain lifestyle. They know that in the fashion industry brand recognition and engagement are key revenue drivers. As a result, measuring brand engagement is important to them because it shows them how effective their marketing initiatives are, which in turn contribute to the company’s bottom line.

Repeat Purchasing

While not all e-commerce sites prioritize brand engagement, every single e-tailer’s number one goal is to sell product. Retention reports can help you measure repeat purchasing to understand how valuable customers find your product offerings.

This retention report will answer the question:

After a customer makes a purchase, for how long do they continue to come back and make additional purchases?

As we discussed above, winning repeat business from existing customers is far more cost effective than converting new ones. This report helps you understand if customers are simply buying from you once and never again, or if you’re building a loyal customer base.

Repeat Purchasing By Campaign

Understanding which marketing campaigns drive the most loyal customers helps you focus and optimize your efforts. Retention reports can tell you how long customers who were originally acquired from a particular campaign continue to make purchases.

For example, you may want to measure the customer loyalty of those who originally found your site through social media. This can be done with a simple retention report that is segmented for “customers who were originally referred by social media”.

Many marketers find that customers sourced from different campaigns have varying degrees of engagement and loyalty. This is largely due to the nature of each channel and how customers engage with you through that channel. Oftentimes we rely on guesswork or assumptions to determine which channels will bring the highest quality leads. Yet sometimes the numbers tell a different story, or at least give you hard data to back up your estimations.

Repeat Purchasing By Product Category

Retention reports can tell you about customer loyalty based on which types of products customers have bought. For example, you may want to measure how long customers who purchase a product from category X come back and purchase ancillary products. Similarly, you may want to understand which product categories drive the most repeat purchases.

Are You Measuring Customer Loyalty?

Tell us how you’re currently measuring customer loyalty and retention for your e-commerce store. Are you using analytics, another tool, or a combination?

To learn more about how to build a retention analytics report with Woopra, please see the tutorial.

Let the match begin.

In This Corner: Web Analytics

Web analytics relies on cookies to track your visitors. Whenever someone lands on your website, a cookie is stored on their browser to track their activity. However, since cookies are stored on browsers, if someone visits your site from a different browser (e.g. Firefox and then Chrome) or a different device (e.g. laptop and then tablet), there is no way using web analytics for you to know that they were the same visitor. But that’s a rare situation, right?

In This Corner: Customer Analytics

Let’s start with a question: How many devices do you use? According to a 2012 report by Cisco, there will be 1.4 mobile devices per capita by 2016. And that’s just mobile.

As we covered above, web analytics relies on cookies and therefore recognizes each cookie on each browser as a new person. Many of your customers use a work computer, home computer, mobile device, and possibly a tablet on a near daily basis. That means they’re probably also using your website and/or application from a work computer, home computer, mobile device, and possibly a tablet. See the problem?

Not having this reflected in your data creates a lot of noise. That’s why customer analytics uses a unique identifier, like an email address, to identify the same user across multiple devices. Here’s how it works:

1. Anonymous visitor lands on your website from work computer. They now have a cookie on that device.
2. Anonymous visitor then signs up on their laptop. They are now identified as Jim Halpert.
3. Jim Halpert downloads your app on his iPad. His activity on your app is aggregated into Jim’s profile.
4. Jim visits your website on his work computer and logs in to access his account. All of his previously anonymous activity (from step 1) is now aggregated into Jim’s profile.
5. Jim visits your website from his laptop, and does not log in. The systems has already associated the cookie with his account and so he is still recognized as Jim Halpert

In a Woopra customer profile it would look something like this:

Notice how the device type, browser, and location are reflected in each visit. We’ve successfully tracked Jim across his work computer, laptop, and iPad, and aggregated all of that activity into a single profile for Jim Halpert. One customer, one lifecycle, one data set.

The Verdict

Now the real question is how is this difference in tracking methods reflected in your analytics reports?

Your Experiences

What issues have you run into with traditional web analytics? Let us know in the comments and we may tackle your problem in an upcoming post.

SaaS companies will have more variation in what should be tracked than other companies like e-commerce or lead generating websites. That is because each SaaS company provides a completely different type of product with very unique actions. Yet, by following some guidelines that apply to nearly all SaaS companies, you can make the process much more efficient.

Stage 1: Marketing Pages & Signups

First and foremost, every SaaS company should track signups. This is one of the most important actions visitors take on your website and you will want to analyze and optimize it over time. For example, if you’re tracking signups, you can create a report that looks like this.

In this report, we see the number of signups that eventually upgraded (see segment at top left “Upgraded”) organized by company size. The reason we were able to sort by company size is because we are sending the property “company size” with the event “signup”. Other properties you can send with the signup event include:

• Email address
• Name
• Username
• Plan/account level
• Company name

The most important property to send with the signup event is the customer’s email address. This is what allows you to identify the visitor and track them across multiple devices (e.g. laptop, iPhone, work computer, etc).

Customer profiles, like the one above, detail every action taken by and the engagement level of each user. Providing the customer’s email address via the signup property allows the system to associate information with this user, giving them a name, username, avatar, etc. This insight is extremely helpful for sales, support, and customer success teams.

In addition to signups, you will want to track any important activity that happens before sign up. This information helps your marketing folks understand what’s working and what’s not.

For example, if you have a promo video on your homepage, you will want to track whenever someone plays the video. You will also want to track whenever someone downloads a white paper, submits a demo request form, shares a blog post on Facebook, etc. With all that time and effort your marketing team puts into producing and maintaining the content on your website, they will want to measure and optimize its effectiveness.

Stage 2: Onboarding & Free Trial

After sign up comes user onboaridng and the extremely critical free trial stage. Each SaaS company has its own onboarding process and key milestones, which all need to be tracked in order to monitor and analyze product adoption and usage. This is where you should give a lot of thought to answering the following question:

What are the key actions a user must take to get value out of my product?

It also helps if you pretend to be a user and go through the sign up, implementation, and onboarding process to document every critical action.

For example, a task management SaaS product that helps teams collaborate efficiently would have the following onboarding milestones for a new account:

1. Setup profile
2. Invite team members
3. Create first task
4. Assign first task

Once we are tracking each of these onboarding steps, we can then analyze, slice, and dice all the data. We can see this activity in each customer’s profile and also create all kinds of reports that give us more insight into our customers’ behavior during onboarding.

For example, a funnel displaying the task management company’s onboarding milestones helps us find our bottlenecks and optimize our conversions.

Stage 3: Usage & Retention

You will want to track the key actions customers commit while using your product. This will vary quite a bit from one SaaS company to another, so again you have to ask yourself a question:

What are the key actions a user takes to continue to get value from my product?

For example, Zendesk will want to track when users assign and reply to tickets, while Salesforce will want to track when users add and edit lead records.

Once we’re tracking these events, we can use them throughout our system so that our reports are directly relevant to our business. For example, we can set up a retention report to see for how long customers continue to use our product and therefore how valuable it is to them.

An online meeting company tracks when users sign up and also when they host online meetings. They created the below retention report which measure how long users continue to come back and host online meetings after they first sign up.

In addition to your “core” actions, you should also track the actions you would expect to see advanced users doing, such as using your more complex features. This will enable you to analyze the behavior of power users and give you clues as to how you can help move your less advanced users along this path.

Other Events to Track

Some other events nearly every SaaS company will want to track include:

• Payment – Whenever a user makes a payment. You will want to also send properties such as payment amount and service the payment was for.
• Sent email – Whenever you send an email to a user, such as one that is part of an automated campaign. Properties you may want to send with this event include email subject, email sender, and campaign ID.
• Support request – Whenever a user submits a ticket. You can also send properties like ticket ID or subject with this event.

Do you need help tracking custom events? Read the documentation or send us an email to support@woopra.com

Disclaimer: Some of the examples above reflect stories from Woopra clients and have been included with the consent of those clients. Others are fictional examples used purely for illustrative purposes.

Eli Rosenberg, the Director of Product at GetGoing, gave some of his time to tell us about how their team uses Woopra. Check out some of Eli’s key points:

• On Choosing Woopra – On the recommendation of another CTO, GetGoing was introduced to Woopra, which they ultimately chose for their analytics based on Woopra’s ability to give them a customer-centric view
• Quantifying Efforts – GetGoing uses Woopra to understand which features are most valued by their customers, where their bottlenecks are, and which campaigns deliver the best ROI
• Making Informed Decisions - With Woopra, GetGoing now has hard numbers to direct their decisions, such as which features to keep and which ones to eliminate
• Analytics Like No Other – Eli explains how Woopra’s ability to track both an event (e.g. search for flight) and its properties (e.g. destinations selected) allows GetGoing to get insight that they haven’t seen available anywhere else
• Measuring New Features – As a product manager, Eli is able to watch how customers interact with new features in real-time, giving him a deep understanding of how users respond to updates
• Improving Customer Support – Whenever GetGoing receives a call or email from a customer, they go first to Woopra to see the customer’s exact activity, which helps them troubleshoot efficiently

Of course Eli says it much better himself, so take a look at the video for the full story!

Interested in sharing your success story with us? Shoot us an email to blog@woopra.com

That’s right, we’re currently hiring in San Francisco and scouring the area for the best of the best. If that’s you, check out our careers page to learn more about these positions:

• System Engineer
• Front-End Engineer – Javascript
• Software Engineer – Java/Servlets
• User Interface Designer
• Sales Specialist

We’re looking for proactive self-starters who thrive in (proven!) startup environments.

Wonder where you’ll be working?

Our new office is a sun-filled open space with a killer city view, right in the heart of SOMA – San Francisco’s hottest tech scene.

Oh yeah, and we’re right around the corner from the CalTrain!

So you want to apply?

Drop us a line at careers@woopra.com and tell us why you’d be a great fit. Don’t forget to include examples of your work so we can see you truly shine.

Learn more about our job openings

While the practice is often talked up to sound almost mystic, no growth hacker can bring you tens of thousands of customers with the wave of a magic wand. In reality, growth hacking requires quite a bit of analysis to deeply understand how customers use your product. As they say, you can’t improve what you don’t measure.

Your company may or may not have a designated growth hacking team, but the practice of understanding how customers use your product in order to drive growth is a crucial component for every business. Below, we outline a few of the growth hacker’s secret weapons.

Funnel Analysis

Spot & Optimize Key Problem Areas

A central part of a growth hacker’s job is discovering where and why you lose customers. Simply finding and optimizing one key area where you have a large drop off can have a ripple effect, leading to a major improvement in your overall conversion rate. But in order to do so, you have to first find the main problem areas so you know where to focus your efforts.

The best place to start is with your funnel analysis. This report is built to show you exactly where you have the largest drop offs in your conversion funnel.

The example funnel below shows the conversion process for Facebook users. The conversion steps are:

1. Complete sign up form
2. Confirm email address
3. Add 10 friends
4. Complete 60% of profile

We can see from this funnel that there is a major drop off at the “add 10 friends” step. This is of course a critical requirement for a user to get value out of Facebook’s product as Facebook is essentially useless if you aren’t connected to any friends.

Clearly, in this example, Facebook’s growth hacking efforts should be focused primarily on getting new users to add friends.

Learn more about how to build and optimize your onboarding funnel.

Find Your Best Performing Customer Segments

To get even more growth hacking insight, you can take a look at how different segments of customers move through your funnel. This will tell you which types of customers perform the best so that you can work on getting more of them to drive your growth.

In the second part of our Facebook example, we see that the three student segments greatly outperform the other segments when it comes to the “add 10 friends” step. Our conclusion makes sense as student users are most likely to quickly find their network on Facebook and add friends.

However, if we look more closely at the three student segments, we see that the elementary and high school students tend to struggle with the final step “complete 60% of profile”, while the university students convert very well here. What we can take away from this for growth hacking is that the elementary and high school student segments should be encouraged via UI/UX to add information to their profiles. We can also conclude that university students move through the funnel very well and are therefore a good segment to focus on to drive growth.

We also see that there is a very large number of sign ups among the “18-30 Non-Students”, however, they underperform at the “add 10 friends” step. For the purpose of growth hacking, we can conclude that adding features and UI/UX components that help users in this segment find their friends on Facebook will help convert more of them. The sheer number of users who sign up in this segment means that even a small improvement in the conversion will result in large gains.

Retention Analysis

Stay On Top of Customer Retention

No matter how many new customers you add, if you don’t retain existing customers, your growth will be slowed. You can fill a bucket faster than a sieve.

You need to understand if customers find your offerings valuable enough to continue using your service or purchasing from you. Retention reports help you get to the bottom of this by answering the question: for how long do my customers continue to come back?

You may be interested in knowing simply whether or not they continue to return, or you may want to know if they return and perform a specific action (such as make a repeat purchase or continue to upload files).

Let’s take a look at the retention report of an online meeting service. The report measures how long users continue to come back and host online meetings after they first sign up.

From the report, we can see that customers tend to use the product to host online meetings most 1, 3, and 4 weeks after sign up. By weeks 6 and 7, it starts to drop off, most likely because that is around the end of the free trial period.

Measure How Product Changes Affect Retention

A big part of growth hacking is understanding how product changes and new features influence product usage. By digging just a bit deeper into a retention report, you can get a good grasp of which changes created the most value for your customers.

In the second example from the online meeting company, we see from the report below that customers who signed up after December have shown better retention than those who signed up before that month. Knowing that the company launched a major product update at the end of December, the numbers indicate that customers responded to the change quite well.

Individual-Level Analysis

Watch & Learn in Real-Time

Often times watching how individual customers interact with your product is the fastest way to diagnose an issue or identify a useful feature. This level of granularity is a hallmark of customer analytics.

For example, watching a customer as they navigate through your website in real-time can give you an instant sense of what features are “sticky”.

Do they quickly move through certain pages or features? That’s often an indication that the content there isn’t engaging to the user. On the other hand, if you see users spending a lot of time actively using a feature, that is generally an indication that the feature is valuable to them.

Answer Usability Questions

Watching users in real-time can be a more exploratory exercise, but you can also use it to answer specific questions. You can do this by looking for similarities in the behavior of individual users within a certain group.

For example, you can look at the past activity of several users who have been inactive for more than two weeks in order to uncover patterns in their behavior. Similarly, you can look at the the customer profiles for several users who recently cancelled accounts, who are power users, or who failed to convert from your free trial in order to find common behavior that will serve as clues for your team.

Going back again to the Facebook example above, we can look at the activities of several users in the “Elementary Students” and “High School Students” segments who completed the “add 10 friends” step, but failed to complete the final “complete 60% of profile” step. By simply monitoring users in this group, we can quickly begin to uncover clues as to why they fail to complete the last step. Once we know why, we can find the appropriate solution and ultimately improve conversions for this segment.

As one Woopra client recently expressed, “we could run a full usability analysis, or we could just spend 5 minutes on Woopra.”

Disclaimer: Some of the examples above reflect stories from Woopra clients and have been included with the consent of those clients. Others are fictional examples used purely for illustrative purposes.