SXSW Panel: Good Analytics Can Get You Booty

Yesterday, Dave McClure, Ted Rheingold, Hiten Shah, Jia Shen and Todd Vernon took to the stage for a panel about startup analytics. The room was packed and the discussion was great. The guys dressed up like pirates and said "AARRR" 24,217 times. Here are some of the net takeaways.

If you do good analytics you can make booty (booty is the pirate term for money). You must test, test and then re-test all of your marketing ideas. Just because one is doing well, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a better one still.

There are five parts to the customer lifecycle:

• Acquisition
• Activation
• Retention
• Referral
• Revenue
• in other words… AARRR

3 business models

• get users
• drive usage
• make money = and hopefully its profitable money
• you must turn the users and the usage into money or get bought

Pretty graphs mean nothing if you don’t do something with it – and perhaps give one metric to each team member to manage

If using landing pages, do lots of tests – the panel said that mentioning the referrer was beneficial "Welcome from Forbes"

Below $20/month is a good number to hit, people seem to stay with this and won’t go through the hassle of cancelling

Hiring a blogger part-time could be a good way to build seo for the company terms

Ted from Dogster explains that by making dynamic landing pages increased registrations

• They got 2,000 registrations but lower numbers of activations – 60%
• Not all activations become active members
• Realized that the terms that they want to rank for don’t appear on the home page
• Got more traffic via organic changes than in a month they spent $90k in online ads

Lijit realized that by testing different entry pages, they were able to increase signups and activations by a large percentage.