I came across Dave McClures “Startup Metrics for Pirates” presentation this week from the Foo Camp conference.

It really has some great metrics and is highly recommended for anyone starting a web-based business.  You’ll learn what you should be tracking, and the conversion funnel approach that I’ve talked about in the past.

AARRR Matey! Take a look:

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We pushed at a major update to siteMighty today. Today’s update included several changes, but the primary improvements are to our siteMighty Analyze services.

Based on feedback we’re getting from users, we’ve substantially improved our built-in analytics. There’s more to come, but here’s where we are as of today.

• Improved conversion tracking - our new report aggregates conversion data over various time periods. We’ve added filtering mechanisms to remove faulty data that represented the search engine spiders and automated robots visiting your site.
• Removed server bandwidth graph - we previously had a report showing the server bandwidth to your site was using. This data was more confusing than valuable, and because we are not regulating accounts based on server usage we eliminated it.
• Added hits versus conversions graph - hits versus conversions is an important metric to tracking usage on your site. Hits to your site represent a daily count of total page views on your site. Conversions represent the number of people who clicked the apply button on a credit card offer.
• Added link to affiliate network stats - we want to be very clear with your user that your official stats that you are paid based on a maintained by your affiliate network. The stats and siteMighty are to assist you in marketing your site, but don’t have a bearing on how you earn. It is important to track your earnings through your affiliate network’s reports.

We’re going to continue to improve our analytics capabilities over the next weeks and months. This is one of the most difficult things for us to develop, because it takes real traffic data to test analytics are performing. We are watching the performance closely, but we ask you to please in mind that these capabilities are still in beta, and we will continue to work on them until we are providing you with the best data possible.

What is conversion tracking?

One of the questions we’ve been getting over the course of the last few weeks, is what is a conversion? A conversion on a siteMighty site is counted when a visitor to your site clicks the apply button on a credit card offer and visits the “conversion page”. The conversion page is the last page on siteMighty the visitor sees before being redirected to the credit card application, which is hosted securely by the credit card issuer.

Think of a breakdown of visitors to your site as a funnel, commonly called a conversion funnel. At the top of the funnel are all visitors to your site, the next level our visitors who siteMighty counts as a conversion, meaning they click the apply button for a credit card. The next level are visitors to actually make it to the application page for credit card company (if they click the back button or close the browser they don’t end up getting there). Once they get to the credit card application page, the next level happens if they fill out the form and actually apply for the credit card. The final level of the funnel is an approval. If a visitor gets approved for the credit card they apply for, you get paid.

We hope this helps you to succeed with your siteMighty site. If you have a questions please contact us. We’ll be continuing to roll out new features. Thanks for being a user.

One of the fundamental principles that we operate on with siteMighty is having data at our fingertips so that we know what is going on at all times. We do this by 1) setting metrics, 2) gathering data, and 3) presenting it in an actionable way.

I have staked the growth of siteMighty to analytics: we have to know how we are doing and act accordingly. One of my failings with Huckabuck is that we built a great web-app but never had any idea how or if people were using it. In the end, the most concrete data we had were the $2 checks that rolled in from our advertising rev-share.

I got serious about this at SXSW in March. siteMighty was ready for beta launch, and functionally it was ready, but we already knew that we didn’t have data tracking and analysis tools that would enable us to stay on top of siteMighty. And as I’ve said before, getting to launch is like pulling up to the starting line, the race hasn’t even started yet, so I knew we needed tools to understand siteMighty. Ryan Carson blogged about his meeting with Ryan Allis the 22 year old CEO of a multi million dollar company. Ryan wrote:

What really struck me though, was how he knew his numbers inside and out. He is absolutely hard-core about measuring everything. It was like a slap in the face - as CEO of Carson Systems, I just don’t know enough about what’s going on.

It is critical to know what is going on. So, here’s what we are doing about it:

I designed an analytics dashboard that is mocked up over the the right there. Here are the important things we wanted to track:

• Open support tickets
• The Visitors / Conversion / Paying Users funnel (more on that below)
• Server bandwidth usage and capacity(so we’re prepped for a TechCrunching)
• Aggregate stats on our users sites so we know if they are seeing success
• Revenue stats

Our conversion funnel was designed to really understand how many people we have to get to visit siteMighty in order to actually make a paying customer out of people. I got a lot of insight into doing this from Mike McDermont from Freshbooks. I basically built our funnel around the ideas he presented here on Vitamin. I lifted his conversion funnel for our mockup. (Thanks Mike!)

So, after three iterations of our analytics dashboard here we are. Our current version is over to the right.

This has be instrumental in helping us understand what is going on with siteMighty, react to the needs of users, and evaluate the success of our marketing efforts. We keep this screen up all day for a live look at what is going on.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on any successes with analytics or challenges with not having the data you need. I’d be happy to provide insight into what we are tracking and why, and please feel free to use anything you can learn from our analytics package on your web app.

• Related caveat: I just ordered the new book Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning which has been highly recommended. Check it out.