Incrementality-based Marketing Analytics Platform

The scaling problem

When I began working with Measured, they were a 3-year-old startup with great potential, however they were struggling to scale the business past a relatively small number of active clients. Measured was having difficulty increasing the number of clients due to the overhead of manual work needed to provide services to each client. I saw the chance to take the knowledge gained from past projects building Marketing Analytics platforms and apply it to Measured.

Pivot to SaaS

While engaging Measured, I made the case for a pivot to a SaaS Product rather than continuing to provide a tech-enabled services Product. This is an understandably big endeavor for any company, so I put forth a proposal: give me a 3-month contract to build a Minimum Viable Product (an early version of a product that provides just enough features to give end-to-end functionality, aka “MVP”), and I will prove Measured can grow to over a hundred clients in a year. Measured agreed.

Assessing the current stack

Since my last engagement two years prior, I had taken time to develop a proper approach to designing a marketing analytics platform. In the first days working with Measured I reached out to the Product team and began assessing the current Product stack. I looked for the strengths and weaknesses inherent in the stack. I looked through the eyes of a client user before asking for a guided tour from a member of the Customer Success team.

Defining the roadmap

I defined a roadmap based on an overriding objective: increase the active client usage by 300% by the end of the year and lay the groundwork for Measured to be able to achieve sustainable client growth in the years following. I set both quantitative and qualitative key metrics within 6 months, 12 months, and 18 months. Examples included number of active clients above a threshold, time to deliver results under a day, and increasing product uptime to 99.99%. After defining the roadmap, I began tracking the metrics using Pendo and Google Analytics.

Validating with data and interviews

A year following the completion of the MVP and the beginning of the transition to the new approach, I compiled the engagement metrics from 6-month intervals and found the following: year over year, there was a 300% increase in the total number of clients, with a similar increase in the number of clients using the Product at least weekly. I also saw a 350% increase in the weekly time on site. While encouraging, quantitative usage metrics do not tell the whole story, so I worked with Product to do Client interviews. Over a period of a month, I sat with 6 different clients and asked them to lead me through their usage of the product. I listened to their feedback. At the conclusion of the interviews, I had collected a significant amount of qualitative data. Encouragingly, it aligned well with the earlier data I was receiving from Pendo and Google Analytics.

Outcome

Over a year and a half into the engagement with Measured, I was able to propose, define, and execute a new Product direction using the tools at hand while also being able to successfully prove the financial benefits of the change.