LaunchRock and Segment.io Present Analytics Academy

Analytics is overwhelming.

Lots of people think that tracking 73 different metrics means they’ve solved their analytics problem. Don’t do it! Unless you’ve got employees twiddling their thumbs, you’ll never be able to handle that many metrics.

You need to think about analytics differently. That’s what we’re here for.

Analytics is about learning.

To succeed, your team needs to learn as quickly as possible. It’s the only way to make sure that every new release is better than your last one. Unfortunately, learning is almost never the priority.

Most web products get made like this:

Build the product.
Throw in analytics.
Pull up your analytics. Get overwhelmed. Go back to building product.

Where did the learning happen? What was the point of looking at the analytics? Why’d you even set up any analytics in the first place?!

That leaves us with a disappointing process for making web products:

Build the product

That’s a recipe for failure.

We know a better way.

The Lean Startup, which you’ve probably heard about but never actuallyread, advocates a much more successful process:

Build an experimental product.
Measure how people respond to your experiment.
Learn whether your experiment worked or not.

The trick though, is that you actually start with step 3.

First, you have to decide what you want to learn. Then, you figure out how you’re going to measure it. And only after that do you build your experiment.

That is the most important thing about analytics! If you take nothing else away from this series, take this: Before you build anything, decide what you’re going to learn from building it.

Read this week’s case studies (Airbnb, Analytics.js and Twitter) and get this week’s quick-start assignments at the Analytics Academy campus on Segment.io.

Subscribe to our blog to get a weekly summary of our new content.