Real-time Dashboards Help LaunchRock Understand The Viral Loop

Last week in Analytics Academy, we taught you a new way to think about analytics. Today, we’re going to introduce you to the first category of tools: real-time dashboards. They’re the most addictive and misunderstood way to learn about your users. And as it turns out, they help give insight into how you might start A Viral Loop for your LaunchRock page.

Real-time dashboards get a bum rap for being too addictive. They’re the hottie at the bar. Your team will gawk, whisper and daydream…

But real-time dashboards aren’t all sex appeal. They’re one of the best ways to keep everyone on your team in the loop and in high spirits.

A good dashboard keeps your entire team aware of how many people are on your site right now, where they came from, and which pages they’re looking at. It’s like looking over all your visitors’ shoulders simultaneously, and it’s guaranteed to give you a better gut understanding of your business.

But there’s a little-known secret that makes dashboards even more important: they naturally make you think of experiments.

Last week we talked about how the trick to analytics is to constantly run small experiments on your business. Real-time dashboards help you come up with those experiments.

Here’s an experiment we ran with our real time dashboard:

LaunchRock Case Study:

LaunchRock helps you get users. One way we do this is through our Discover network. If your LaunchRock page starts getting traction, LaunchRock can promote it on Twitter and in our Discover email newsletter.

Every LaunchRock page is in a sense an experiment — which pages will be popular? Using our real-time dashboard, we can see which pages are going viral. Popular launch pages are likely to be significantly more interesting to people in the Discover network, so we use our dashboard to decide which pages to promote.

By using our real-time dashboard to find landing pages to promote, we’ve significantly increased engagement in our Discover network and as a result we drive mores signups to launch pages.

We’ve also used our dashboard to validate another hypothesis: teams who carefully cultivate a relationship with their initial signup list get a huge boost when they launch a new product.

The hypothesis came from noticing a pattern on our dashboard: teams would email a new product launch page to signups from their first product. The traffic to the new product would start with returning visitors, but quickly expand to a torrent of new visitors. The initial burst of traffic would drive a strong viral loop:

So How Will It Work for You?

To get your quick start guide, learn more about running experiments with Real-Time Dashboards and read more great case studies, check out the full post at Analytics Academy.