SaaS Analytics Dashboards: Metrics Should You Track To Boost Your Business

Since the SaaS market is incredibly competitive, you always need to be on top of your game and act fast according to the results you are getting. SaaS data visualization analytics dashboard come as an accessible way to identify your position in the market as well as your strengths and weaknesses. They let you make informed decisions based on visual data of the key metrics such as churn, cost, and revenues.

To make those metrics work for you, you need a unified system that can save you and your team a lot of time understanding and visualizing everything. It shows data in real time and allows you to set KPIs for your team to improve on them and gain a bigger profit. It also gives a full picture of how your business is doing. Thus, you can take needed action and plan for your company's future without the need to read lengthy reports.

This article is for you if you are just thinking about getting a SaaS metrics dashboard or making your existing dashboard more comprehensible and getting the most out of your data.

Seeing all of your data on one screen might be overwhelming. Still, it is a must for a clear understanding of your business's state, the effectiveness of all the team members, and marketing campaigns success. That's why dashboards are a good way to present all of that vital information. With just one glance at the screen, you can see all the pain points or the first signs of success and take immediate action to fix or improve your strategy.

Think of it as the homepage of your business. There are no complicated Excel sheets with a bunch of numbers that are hard to understand. Surely, SaaS dashboard development time might not be the one you initially plan when building a startup. But this is an extremely important step for the continued functioning of your business.

A proper SaaS dashboard can save you time and rid of any hustle. But that's not the only thing it is suitable for. Here are the top 3 reasons why you need to have SaaS marketing dashboards.

SaaS dashboards as service provide an accessible and visual representation of your data to key people involved in the process. You can easily share dashboards with anyone having an access link. There is no need to download special programs to view all the metrics.

It is possible to make a dashboard with different access levels for each team member or create separate dashboards with each department's key metrics. Moreover, it allows you to make an individual dashboard with all of the key metrics for board members or investors so that they participate in critical business processes.

If all the key data is accessible to everyone, it can get much more attention. As you create your services and improve your presence in the business world, you can see the impact all of these actions have on your company. And so can your employees.

According to TINYpulse's survey, transparency was named the number one factor contributing to employees' overall happiness. Data transparency allows employees to feel more involved in all business processes. Oftentimes it can reduce inaccurate perceptions and inspire trust, providing clear information to anyone who works with it.

Switching between different data sources can be time-consuming. Dashboards store all the information in one place where you can immediately check a specific metric or KPI and take action upon it.

If you keep control of your data daily, you will notice any unusual trends and tendencies. Thus, you will be able to make swift changes to it. You can set up your SaaS metrics dashboard according to the required criteria and even customize certain features. For example, you can set special reminders or alerts when there is a huge spike or drop happening in one or all of the metrics you keep track of.

Paying attention to your weaknesses and turning them into strengths is a sure way to scale your business. And a strategic dashboard can be a great starting point for that.

Knowing your metrics can help you develop a growth plan as it is easier to set goals and new KPIs based on the data you already have. If you spot trends in real-time, you can plan and improve your business and grow as a company.

SaaS heavily relies on recurring revenues and users who provide it. Revenue for a SaaS service comes over an extended period. Sometimes it is hard to predict whether there will be any growth or fall in these numbers. That's when keeping track of all of the crucial data is required. Below is a list of the necessary metrics for any business that need to be included when you build your own SaaS analytics dashboard.

Customer churn is the rate at which customers stop using your services and leave during a given period. It possibly indicates customers' dissatisfaction with your product whenever they found something better or cheaper or that they are just no longer interested in your product.

While you can expect some churn, a significant amount of churn can show that something is wrong and you need to act upon it. 5-7% annual churn is usually considered acceptable for SaaS companies. Smaller ventures that are just starting can expect bigger churns, and that's okay. But the bigger the company, the lower the churn rate should be. A high churn rate can even destroy your company. Remember that acquiring new customers is usually more expensive than keeping existing ones. That's why you have to pay special attention to this indicator and has to be a part of your SaaS metric dashboard's list.

It is essential to notice when the churn rate increases and do everything possible to narrow it down to an acceptable percentage. SaaS dashboard can keep track of the customer journey, so when the churn happened, you can pinpoint the exact moment something went wrong and act accordingly. Did people like your product, but the level of service was insufficient for them? The dashboard will show it. Did it take too long for your support team to answer? Look it up on your SaaS KPI dashboard and work on reducing the waiting time.

Also known as average revenue per customer/account is one of the frequently neglected metrics in SaaS analytics dashboards. That is remarkable considering how much it could mean for scaling your company.

ARPU helps you figure out how much money the average user spends on your service. It measures the amount of revenue your company gets with each customer and helps you see different spending patterns. Behavior patterns can present you with a lot of optimization options so you can move on to swift decision-making. Pricing, positioning, and support can heavily rely on the amount of ARPU you have.

ARPU lets you divide customers into different groups such as free users, trials, and paying consumers with a subscription. Since the first ones do not generate any revenue for your company, you should think about not including them in statistics and keep track of them elsewhere.

Monthly recurring revenue or MRR is a crucial KPI metric for SaaS business. This essential metric can give you a comprehensive view of your business in a clear and graphical way.

You can pull MRR straight from your billing service or calculate by summarizing all the monthly revenue. Another way is to multiply the total number of active customers by the average monthly recurring revenue per user (ARPU).

For example, if five customers pay you $100/month on average, your MRR will be $500.

When measuring MRR is not enough, you can also include these metrics to your dashboard:

These factors can affect the size of your regular monthly income. Knowing them, you can calculate your Net New MRR:

Customer acquisition cost or CAC is the average expense of gaining a single customer. It is calculated by adding up all the costs involved during the acquisition process, including marketing and sales expenses.

SaaS companies often invest a lot to acquire a customer, and it takes time to recover the profits. So it is crucial to understand how much it costs to sign up a new customer to build an appropriate financial strategy. This is the most relevant for new companies with high CAC during their first years of existence.

You can use a dynamic dashboard that shows CAC for making principal financial decisions and future planning. It can also warn you about spending excessive amounts of money to acquire new customers. Which you may not be able to afford in the long run. CAC helps you understand the sustainability and scalability of the company and increase profits.

Visualization and understanding of all the above-mentioned metrics will help build more specific business processes and develop the strategy. We mentioned only the must-have key metrics that you should include in the SaaS dashboard, but there are other vital indicators. We've put them in the checklist below. It is crucial to note that the final version of included SaaS metrics and kpis will depend on your service specialization. Pick the ones that provide the necessary context to take action:

One of the essential things in every good SaaS admin dashboard is functional and intuitive user-friendly design. Often, many company employees have to work with dashboards. So they must clearly understand all the metrics they have to keep track of and all the tasks they need to do.

That is why an ideal SaaS analytics dashboard should be interactive and clean in terms of design while providing all the valuable data. All the vital analytics and metrics should be readable without any special documentation.

SaaS dashboard templates that you can find on the market might not always work. That's why you'll probably have to develop your own SaaS dashboard software or customize an already existing dashboard template to include the key performance indicators mentioned above.

Sometimes even a small change can go a long way for better visualization. Take a look at one of our projects — AQUILA. AQUILA is an intelligent worker's compensation fraud detection platform. They work with data-heavy tables and need to track suspicious patterns and proactively detect worker's compensation fraud. We did research, worked with client feedback, and presented a renewed layout. We created a modern UI and improved UX to make the user interface more modular and easily editable. Check out our solution and all the details in our case study.

Some of the best practices for SaaS that you could use while developing such a data management tool include:

Choosing to implement dashboards for your SaaS service can help you keep track of all of your business processes in one place. A clear understanding of all vital metrics can help you strengthen your company and lead it to a better future. Your SaaS metrics dashboard should cater to your company's needs without a fault and be customizable enough to get comprehensive information about internal processes and track all the metrics and KPIs in one place without the need to switch between different apps. You can take a look at different examples of SaaS sales dashboard to find the desired look and contact us to find estimated SaaS dashboard cost.

The Aspirity team has experience in building dashboards for different companies. We even created our modern dashboard template based on the most popular frameworks — React and Angular. Get in touch with us to make your own SaaS dashboard.

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