Product Analytics
The Key Metrics That Fintech Product Managers Can’t Live Without
Last updateD on
February 26, 2021
If each product is a world in its own, each industry in which that product -or service, for that matter- is deployed, is a universe. A seemingly chaotic universe full of data coming from every direction and angle that you, the product manager, need to catch, analyze, and funnel into your every day. If this does not sound easy, it is because it is not!
You will need to discover the right tools to tackle this planetary endeavor but you need to know first which metrics are key to your project, your company, your industry, and your context. The better you understand them and create the unique datasets that will populate your dashboard and define your workflow, the closer you will be to exceeding your KPIs and goals. This we have heard before. What we have not though, is how to implement this correctly for each industry, each universe.
So with that in mind, in this post we will cover the universe that Fintech is and how product managers can go about exploring it. In the past, we have shared some wisdom regarding privacy policies and non-industry-specific best practices for PMs. However, this time we will go over the basics of the what and why to keep in mind when managing a FinTech product.
A session is each launch of your application or a visitor landing on a web page. Everything your users do during each of those sessions create the data points that will guide all of your discoveries. With the information from billions of these data points and thousands of customers you will identify similar consuming patterns, track current experiences, and measure their expectations. And the kickstarter of all those data sets will be the basic session information which includes:
Of course, you will then have to further segment this client data, comparing individual customers by, for example, the same spending or behavioral patterns. This will help your product and marketing teams to develop data-oriented features considering your customers’ requirements and to promote more user-centric products to the right customer segment.
Also, keeping track of your session-related metrics will give you insights on how good of a job your app is doing in retaining your customers. A general rule of thumb is that the more often your customers use your app, the higher their retention rate.
Tools to track these metrics: Web Analytics, Mobile Analytics (which includes User Loyalty, Session Frequency, and more), and User Retention.
If there is a strong suit that Fintechs pride on and a definite edge over traditional financial institutions, it is their customer support framework. However, the ability to listen to customers is more than just chatbots, AI-powered help, and online support: real and effective listening can only be achieved when any user can proactively and reactively let you know their thoughts about your product. This includes persistently tracking metrics that will determine overall customer sentiments, which ultimately impact your loyalty rates.
Now, there are several metrics to analyze customer satisfaction, including:
Out of these, Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) probably has the highest impact, because it gauges your customer’s overall satisfaction, lets you pin-point which your targeted goals are, and action on those customers that go below it. Once you identify the customers and the context surrounding their low scores, you can try asking for their feedback and/or place them as the target of a campaign that will try to make them happier — and more loyal!
Remember that NPS should be just a fraction of a larger Voice of the Customer program, which should at the very least include segmented in-app surveys tailored specifically to metrics related to your product.
Tools to track these metrics: NPS® and Surveys.
Functionality-wise, each product will be different and its technical requirements will vary enormously depending on tech stack and app capabilities. That said, at the end of the day, the customer perception will still be the same from a front-end perspective: if something fails to prompt on the screen as expected when requested, we have a problem.
Nothing is more critical to UX than making sure that bugs, crashes, and basically anything that could affect the overall performance of the app or website is thoroughly tracked and investigated to make sure they never happen again.
Especially when dealing with highly sensitive data, Fintechs must avoid crashes and errors at all costs, so understanding metrics like the following needs to be an absolute priority:
And if a fatal crash does occur, you must be able to analyze its impact on the UX and work towards repairing the damage caused by such impact from both a technical and UX point of view. For that, you may consider targeted push notifications or assess the experience with in-app surveys, and tracking responses from the users.
After all this, once crashes are minimized, you must then understand if, when, and where certain networks impact negatively in, for example, the UI rendering. This task includes paying attention to metrics such as:
Tools to track these metrics: Crashes & Errors and Performance Monitoring.
Aligned with potential technical issues that will prevent your customer from continuous and seamless usage, you must know which actions they do within your app. With that information you can assess if their actions led to those crashes or errors that stopped them from fulfilling a crucial process, like signing in or completing a transaction. If not, then something in the UI made them stop: maybe a button was not well placed, or the information about a process was not clear, or they lacked a key piece of information that was mandatory.
The data stemmed from the actions and paths your customers take through your app or web tells the story of their progress and completion of the custom process you create for them. For this purpose, you should focus on metrics such as:
Knowing how successful customers are when navigating through your product will give you the full picture you need not only to identify pain points and correct them from a design standpoint, but also to develop a strategy that will get those customers that failed a process to get back on track and complete it.
Tools to track these metrics: Funnels, Flows, and Cohorts.
Once you know which users do or do not work their way through your app, you can then focus on revenue metrics. Revenue is the bar that businesses will constantly try to raise and therefore, you must master your understanding of it. All the metrics that we have mentioned until now are involved in revenue but, obviously, revenue has its own set of particular parameters that you will want to track, including:
Each product will of course have revenue variables, but all of these will come in handy way more often that you may think.
Tools to track these metrics: Slipping Away and Revenue Analytics.
We did say in the beginning that the complexities that surround a PM’s job does not make this position fit for the light hearted. To overcome these complexities, what you need is to partner up with the team and the technology that will make your job not only easier but also more efficient.
Countly is that technology: with easy deployment, adaptable SLAs, a customizable plugin-based interface, and privacy-first approach, Countly is the best solution for every PM who wants detailed customer insights to guide product development and optimize their customers’ journeys, and to always stay on top of their business goals. On top of that, Countly has self-hosted options, secure data transmission, and data-at-rest encryption, making Countly every Fintech’s dream product analytics and marketing platform that sales, technical, marketing, and other teams can easily use too! Plus, finding out how to get started is as easy as booking your demo here or contacting us here.
