With Cladwell going live last week, it was important for us to get actionable metrics and lifecycle messaging in place. Now that prospective members can do more than sign up for early access, we need to know what’s working, and what’s not.

This can be an easy process or a difficult one; it all depends on the tools you use.

Segment.io

People and projects have varying requirements when it comes to analytics. As projects evolve, you will want to track additional metrics, and integrate a variety of tools. Traditionally, this is be a hassle for developers; implementing and understanding multiple API’s, and procrastination leads to delay for those who need the information.

That’s where Segment.io comes in.

By implementing one API, you send your data to Segment.io, and it pushes your data to the various tools that you wish to use. Not only can you send this data to multiple services with the simple flip of a switch, but you’re likely to have few issues implementing in your language of choice. Segment.io offers support for many languages; we made use of their JavaScript and Ruby implementations.

USERcycle

One of the many options available to us through Segment.io is USERcycle. This analytics service allows us to track pirate metrics (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue) AARRR.

These core metrics represent the basic user cycle we track. We’re also integrated with Google Analytics through Segment.io, which makes it easy for us to implement both services... most of the time.

Rather than only using Google Analytics, which does a great job at tracking anonymous information, USERcycle was chosen because it covers the key metrics, and also provides a mechanism to implement lifecycle messaging.

Within USERcycle is the ability to send emails based off of events. When users get stalled in a process, we now have the ability to send conditional emails so we can find out why they stopped, and prompt them to continue.

Defining Events

One of the first tasks is to develop your definition of what an "activated" user is. For Cladwell, we defined 'activate' to be when a user requests a recommendation for clothing. To get to that step, it means they also finished taking our survey; it's a good milestone to decide that they’re fairly interested, and will be coming back.

Often you will want to trigger messaging based on custom events in your app.

For us, we needed to define custom events for when users started the survey, completed the survey, and when we sent them a recommendation.

With these data points, we were able to load into USERcycle messages that are automatically sent when users don't start the survey, when they start the survey but don't complete it, as well as a request for feedback after we've delivered a recommendation to them.

Measurement is a journey

We're just getting started in establishing a culture of measurement with Cladwell, but setting up USERcycle is a great start.