Collecting data and tracking metrics can be tricky.
So, here are some tips and awesome tools for how to go about that process.
First is Google Analytics.
It's great for getting stats on traffic.
You can see demographics, user devices, and browser types inversions.
It's a bit more exploratory in nature, but
you can quickly get data on page views and click through rates.
You do want to be careful because oftentimes the data does not show
unique users.
Analytics can be messy, so it's good to reproduce the numbers in two tools.
Mixpanel is another great tool to measure user activities.
It's particularly great for measuring drop off in a funnel.
You can build customer funnels to determine if students drop off at step
one step two, or step three of any process or sequence of behaviors.
It's also useful for measuring retention.
Now, you will need to be deliberate about instrumenting events
that you want to track when using the tool.
This forces you to get clear about what you want to know about your users.
If you come across big differences when using two tools like Google Analytics
and Mixpanel, you want to dig deep to determine which value is more reliable
and what might be driving this difference.
If you're building an app,
AdMob is another excellent tool to add to your arsenal.
It offers many features, such as flows to the application,
user exit points, and ways to automatically maximize add revenue.
If you're looking to conduct surveys, you might use tools such as Qualtrics.
They're a popular solution for MPS.
You might also try SurveyMonkey or Google forms.
Once you have a user base and feel like you have a core product,
you can optimize around smaller changes in your website, such as layout,
headlines, button colors, and images.
This is called the A/B testing and
Optimizely is one tool that let's you do this easily.
Now, A/B testing isn't the best way to go, and certainly,
not when you're first starting out.
Up next, Pete from Optimizely will discuss why this is in more detail.