lean analytics

What data are data scientists at startups actually analyzing? How is it collected?

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Question: What data are data scientists at startups actually analyzing? How is it collected?
(Coming from a web analytics background I’m wondering what data are data scientist at IT companies actually analyzing. Is it server-side or client-side? Is it collected internally or using some external tool?)

Answer:

Part 1: What are startups analyzing?

It depends on the Business Model and the Stage that they are at.

Business Models: Marketplace, Ecom, SaaS, Media, etc.

Stage: Early, Mid, Late

So let’s say you have a SaaS model and you’re in Mid-stage (post product-market fit stage) then you would tend to be focused on things like: Engagement, Churn, etc…and ideally they should be focused on measuring what aligns best with the strategy (instead of capturing everything!)

Let’s take another example. Let’s say you are a Marketplace in late-stage. So you would tend to be focused more on the “money” and so you can measure things like: transactions, commissions, etc…

I recommend reading “lean analytics” book as it goes much deeper and it’s a great starting point for anyone to understand how analytics could help a startup.

Part 2: How is it collected?

Now this also depends on your product. Assuming you’re a tech startup, you would have Web App and/or Desktop app and/or Mobile app. And now depending on your delivery approach plus your measurement needs, the “how” part will be determined. It would invariably be a combination of your transactions data source, web/mobile events stack (like Google analytics/other-Vendor or Custom), finance data source among others.

This post points to 10 other blogs which lists their “data” stack: The Data Infrastructure Meta-Analysis: How Top Engineering Organizations Built Their Big Data Stacks – The Data Point

View Question on Quora

How to analyze “new users” metric by specific pages in Google Analytics?

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Problem:

you want to create a funnel chart of how your new users move from their landing page to your desired destination. Ideally it’s goes something like this:

Stage 1) lands on your home/landing page

Stage 2) goes to a product page

stage 3) goes to a checkout page

stage 4) sees a thank you page

Now, if you want to analyze the conversion among these stages for a “new” user then you will need create custom reports in google analytics. You will basically need to create a report for each specific page that you want to analyze. So how to set one up?

Solution: 

1) Navigate to Google analytics profile

2) On the top of the go to “customization” section and click on create a new custom report

3) here’s how you can set up a custom report that will use you new users by a specific page (notice the page filter?).

New users by specific pages funnel visualization google analytics

Conclusion:

In this post, I outlined the steps that you need to take to setup a custom report in google analytics that shows you new users by specific pages.