18 SaaS Metrics and KPIs Every Company Should Track

Growing any business is difficult, but scaling a software as a service (SaaS) company is especially hard.

Most SaaS companies struggle to achieve predictable revenue growth, and even public SaaS companies struggle to achieve profitability.

To make a SaaS company successful, you can’t just change your software delivery model to the web and expect it all to work. You must make thoughtful, data-driven decisions when it comes to your marketing, sales, and customer success operations.

To make data-driven decisions, you have to track the right SaaS metrics andKPIs.

为什么数据对SaaS业务如此重要？

The SaaS economic model is unique.

In comparison to the enterprise software firms of yesteryear that could rely on large, upfront fees to get a quick payback, the SaaS business model relies on small amounts of recurring revenues.

And unlike a services businesses where you can pay for your new equipment after the first few jobs—or a consulting business with no overhead that can close big upfront contracts from the get-go—revenue in a SaaS business is built one small sale at a time, paid in small increments.

This makes SaaS difficult in terms of marketing, sales, and customer success.

SaaS营销很困难，因为您需要找到方法来寻找和吸引大量质量线索，然后找到增加未来几年的潜在客户量的方法 - 所有预算都在较小的预算中。

SaaS sales is also difficult. You need to find ways to make your salespeople more efficient so they can close more deals more quickly. But every investment you make in productivity increases your payback period even further. And often, you can’t afford to hire experienced salespeople to help you figure it out.

SaaS customer success is difficult because it’s just another upfront expense you must justify within an already limited budget. But it’s critical because you might not get any payback on your marketing, sales, or customer service if customers cancel before break-even occurs.

But even though scaling a SaaS company is hard, it’s not impossible. Fortunately for all of us, a few successful SaaS pioneers have shared parts of their playbooks:

• Companies like HubSpot and Marketo invented and then shared their modern marketing and sales playbooks—as well as their financials as public companies—leaving little doubt of the effectiveness of those models.
• Zendesk certainly eats its own cooking, showing companies how to manage customer success.
• Trailblazer Salesforce has shown us what it takes to keep growing and growing.
• Even relative newcomers like Buffer are leading the way by transparently exposing their inner-workings, even during their adolescent SaaS phase.
• We have investors like David Skok and Jason Lemkin who have seen the playbook from inside many a SaaS boardroom and shared those strategies in great detail.
• And that’s not to mention the services companies—like inside sales consulting firm The Bridge Group and inbound marketing agency Kuno Kreative—that have made a name for themselves by helping SaaS companies scale and sharing their best practices.

这些公司，投资者和顾问共同创建并命名了一套SaaS指标和KPI，每个SaaS员工都明智地理解，每个SaaS高管都应密切监视。

The 18 Most Important SaaS Metrics and KPIs

Since we’re a data-driven SaaS company—and one that also helps other companies monitor their most important performance metrics—we’ve compiled a list of the 18 SaaS metrics and KPIs all companies should track.

1. 每月唯一的访客
2. Signups
3. Product-Qualified Leads (PQLs)
4. Qualified Lead Velocity Rate (LVR)
5. Organic vs. Paid Traffic ROI
6. Viral Coefficient
7. 向客户的转换率
8. 每个帐户的平均收入（ARPA）
9. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
10. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
11. Number of Support Tickets Created
12. Average First Response Time
13. Average Resolution Time
14. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
15. Number of Active Users
16. Customer Retention Rate
17. Churn Rate
18. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

1. Monthly Unique Visitors

每月唯一的访问者是在给定月份访问您网站的独特个人数量的数量。如果有人多次访问您的网站，他/她只会被视为一个独特的访客（假设每次访问使用相同的设备和浏览器，并且访问者不会在访问之间清除他/她的饼干）。

While this metric alone doesn’t provide many insights, it’s a great reflection of the size of your audience, and it’s a good measure of the impact of your overall marketing efforts. Plus, by measuring the volume of unique visitors from each source, you can also measure the effects of marketing on different channels.

尽管独特的每月访问者的增长是您顶级营销的有效性的大量衡量标准，但不要忘记看一看engagement metricslike average time on site, average pages visited, repeat visits, number of comments, downloaded content, email subscriptions, etc.

These metrics will tell you about the quality of your traffic, which is just as important as quantity.

Use tools like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics to measure unique visitors. Since Google Analytics is free, most SaaS companies start there.

2. Signups

Not every SaaS product offers a free trial or a self-service option. Many force you to talk to a salesperson before trialing the software. But self-service is perhaps the best way to lower the cost of customer acquisition.

For self-service SaaS companies, signups is probably the most important metric.

Whether you offer a free trial or a freemium plan, marketing’s goal should be to drive signups.

In an ideal world, the user can learn the software on his/her own, begin using it regularly, and find enough value toconvert to a paying customer.

There are many ways to increase signups, including writing helpful, educational content for both prospective and existing users and optimizing your website’s conversion rate.

3. Product-Qualified Leads (PQLs)

Tomasz Tunguz, a venture capitalist at Redpoint Ventures, defines PQLs as “potential customers who have used a product and reached pre-defined triggers that signify a strong likelihood to become a paying customer.”

For freemium business models, a PQL is the new MQL (or marketing-qualified lead). It helps SaaS businesses pre-qualify potential customers based on their product usage.

At Databox, PQLs are one of the most important metrics we track. Ourfree productallows users to connect three data sources for free, add up to three users, and access fewer features than our paid products.

We’ve defined PQL criteria for our business based on a user’s interactions with the product: number of features used, time spent in the product, and frequency of usage. Our developers then run experiments to increase our PQL volume.

We determine whether a user meets our PQL thresholds using Intercom.

4. Qualified Lead Velocity Rate (LVR)

Once you’ve documented your PQL (or MQL) definition, you need to calculate how many new PQLs you need each month.

Knowing yourqualified-lead-to-customer conversion ratio，从收入目标向后工作以计算所需的潜在客户量。

All would be great in the world if you could snap your fingers and start generating the lead volume you need to exceed your revenue target. But since that’s not realistic, plan to increase your lead volume every month so that you’re comfortably hitting your annual revenue target by the end of the year.

Why should you obsess over LVR? Since it’s just a matter of time before some percentage of your qualified leads convert, LVR is a great indicator of future sales attainment.

To calculate LVR, use the following formula:

For example, imagine you created 1,100 qualified leads this month and 1,000 qualified leads last month. You are growing LVR at 10% month-over-month.

假设你的质量leads stays the same, use your average sales cycle to forecast new sales revenue in future months.

5. Organic vs. Paid Traffic ROI

Organic traffic metrics include visitors who arrive from a non-paid (organic) listing in the search results. Paid traffic metrics, on the other hand, include visitors who arrived from paid search results like pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

Where you invest your marketing dollars should depend on how quickly you need results and how much money you have:

• If you need immediate results and have the budget for it, paid search is the right place to focus.
• If you don’t need immediate results, focus much of your time and budget on content creation to steadily grow organic traffic over time.

Of course, if you intend to be in business in the future, it’s always smart to invest in growing your organic traffic regardless of where you focus your efforts up front.

Related:SEO vs. PPC: Which Channel Generates More Sales?

如果您可以同时做，请同时做。不过不要浪费钱。确保您converting your traffic(especially your paid traffic) into revenue.

No matter where you invest, it’s essential to measure the volume of traffic, leads, and customers you are generating from your organic and paid traffic channels.

To track the performance of your paid and organic channels, you’ll need a few tools to get a full picture:

• You’ll need an analytics tool like Google Analytics or HubSpot to measure your traffic, lead, and customer acquisition volume by each channel.
• You’ll need an SEO tool like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz to see what keywords you’re ranking for in organic search and what positions you’re ranking in.
• You should also connect with your ad platform (Google Ads or Bing Ads) to see your paid search performance more granularly.

If you don’t want to have to pull metrics from multiple tools and enter them all into a spreadsheet to get a complete picture of the ROI of your organic and paid search efforts, Databox can help.

6. Viral Coefficient

口碑营销cannot be beaten. When your existing customers help you acquire new customers, growth can be exponential.

Perfected by consumer internet companies as early as Hotmail (before it was bought by Microsoft), Airbnb, and Gmail—as well as newer internet software darlings like Dropbox, Slack, and every successful social network ever—virality is every SaaS startup’s dream.

To measure virality, calculate your viral coefficient. The formula is simple:

• Invites = number of invitations the average user sends
• Conversion percent = the percentage of invitees that convert to customers

As an example, a virality coefficient of 1.5 means that every signup brings 0.5 additional signups, so for 100 signups, you actually get 150.

您的病毒系数越大，公司的增长越快。

To model your viral growth rate,download this calculatorfrom David Skok’s blog.

7. Conversion Rate to Customer

Depending on how you’ve defined your marketing and sales process, you might have different definitions for different types of leads. You might have:

• subscribers who simply subscribed to your blog
• 填写您网站上表格的潜在客户下载电子书
• marketing-qualified leads who fit a strict definition of “fit” and “interest” based on how they’ve interacted with your site and what you know about them and their companies
• product-qualified领导使用的部分r free product

You might even use all of these definitions.

At Databox, we pay close attention to the number ofPQLswho convert to customers, but we also measure the overall number of new users who convert to customers, too. As an example, we measure our PQL to customer conversion rate as the percentage of PQLs that end up converting to paid customers.

这是我们简单的公式:

无论您测量的铅到客户转换率是什么，请确保定义不同的潜在客户类型并始终如一地计算转换率。

Your conversion rate is a benchmark for how good of a job you are doing at turning leads into customers. Byincreasing your conversion rate to customer, you’re directly increasing your revenue.

To measure your conversion rates, many companies use a marketing automation platform like HubSpot or Marketo and/or a CRM like Salesforce or Pipedrive. We’re pulling PQL volume from Intercom and sales data from Stripe, then doing the calculation inside of Databox.

8. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA)

每个帐户（ARPA）的平均收入，也称为每个用户/单位（ARPU）的平均收入，是对每个帐户产生的收入的度量（通常是每月每月每月运营的每月运营）。但是，您始终可以根据您的计划和计费选项每年或每季度计算它。

A simple way to calculate ARPA is to calculate the totalMRRyou have at the end of the month and divide it by the number of active customers at that time, like so:

A good practice is measuring ARPA for new and existing customers separately to have a sense of how your ARPA is evolving—or if new customers behave differently than existing ones. Some companies also calculate this as average sales price (ASP) to separate the impact of upselling from the price at the initial sale.

To track your ARPA, you need to rely on your billing or accounting system. Many SaaS companies use Stripe to manage billing, but you may also need to pull data from PayPal or QuickBooks if you are using those systems.

If you’re using multiple payment methods and have not consolidated your data into a centralized accounting system, you might need to pull from multiple systems and add the numbers together.

9. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

David Skok calls CACthe startup killerbecause a very large number of startups have failed (even those that solved the product/market fit problem) because they did not find a way to acquire customers at a low enough cost.

Understanding how much it costs to acquire new customers—and identifying the most profitable marketing and sales channels—is the key to profitably scaling a SaaS business.

To calculate it, divide your total sales and marketing costs by the number of deals closed within a given period. If you’re following an inside, channel, or field sales model, make sure to include salaries. If your product sells itself without salespeople, you can calculate your costs without the headcount costs.

遵循此公式：

A viable business model for a SaaS company comes down to balancing two variables:

1. CAC
2. the ability to monetize those customers (orLTV，代表客户的终身价值）

In an unbalanced business model, CAC exceeds LTV, whereas in a balanced model, CAC is significantly smaller than LTV.

Skok gives us two rough rules of thumb regarding CAC:

1. 您的LTV应该是可行的SaaS公司的CAC的三倍，或任何其他形式的经常性收入模型。
2. You should recover your CAC in less than 12 months, otherwise, your business will require too much capital to grow.

Per Skok, CAC changes drasticallybased on the complexity of your selling model. Freemium or self-service business models have CACs between $0 and $200. Light- and high-touch inside sales inflate CACs to between $300 and $8,000. With a field sales team, your CAC can go from $20,000 to even up to $200,000.

To reduce CAC, try A/B testing to improve conversion rates, minimize the level of touch required to complete a sale, or make your product easier to use more quickly via an improved trial process.

要计算CAC，您需要从诸如QuickBooks或在电子表格中手动跟踪之类的所有费用来汇总所有费用。另外，您需要跟踪每个时期内获得的新付费用户的数量。

10. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

Recurring revenue is the lifeblood of any SaaS business. Your MRR is a single and consistent number to track no matter how many pricing plans and billing cycles you have. Hence, why it is crucial to monitor this data using aSaaS MRR仪表板

But how do you calculate MRR?

The easiest way is to summarize all the revenue you receive from your paying customers per month. Another way is to multiply the total number of paying customers by the average revenue per user (ARPU).

For example, say you have five customers. Three of them are paying $100/month, one is paying $200/month and one is paying $960/year. MRR in this example is $580: (3 x $100) + $200 + $80. When divided by the number of customers (5), you get the ARPU ($116 in this case).

While that calculation sounds simple (and it is), SaaS companies need to calculate multiple MRR numbers, depending on the complexity of their businesses. For example, all SaaS companies should measure new MRR and churned MRR to calculate net MRR.

If you’ve built a pricing and packaging strategy that enables you to generate additional revenue from existing customers, you should also calculate add-on MRR and factor that into net MRR.

Here’s a list of different MRR numbers you should calculate:

• New MRR added in a given month by only new customers
• Add-on MRR (or expansion MRR) from existing customers (buying additional product features, upgrading the account, adding new users, etc.)
• Churn MRR: the monthly revenue lost from cancellations and downgrades
• Net new MRR (or total new MRR): the total recurring revenue at the end of each given month by including add-on and churn

If you measure a higher churn MRR than your new MRR, you are likely losing as many customers as you are gaining each month. That is a recipe for going out of business fast.

When your add-on MRR is higher than your churn MRR, that means you’ve figured out how to have positive retention (or negative churn). Enough of your existing customers are upgrading, countering the revenue lost from the customers who are canceling. In this scenario, the average new customer you acquire will grow your revenue.

货币公司更多地专注于衡量年度经常性收入（ARR）。正如您想象的那样，ARR是经常收入的年度价值，是每月的经常性率乘以12。

Once you achieve positive retention rates, ARR gives you an estimation of how much revenue you’ll generate in a year, not including customers you’ll likely book during the remainder of the year.

11.创建的支持门票数量

It’s inevitable to receive a certain number of complaints, questions, and suggestions from your customers. The number of support tickets created is a measure of how many customers are requesting help.

Better than just tracking an absolute number of support tickets, you should keep an eye on the trend of average numbers of daily, weekly, and monthly tickets in case you see an escalation of tickets.

A good practice is to tag tickets by types (bugs, feature requests, questions, suggestions and other). If you stay organized with tags, you’ll be able to quickly determine whether there’s a problem, usability issues, or just active customers requesting new capabilities when ticket volumes inevitably spike.

Use a service like Zendesk or Help Scout to monitor your support ticket volume. We track tickets created via Intercom chat.

12.平均第一响应时间

平均第一个响应时间是客户支持案件的平均时间（客户）提交案件（客户）。

Because people don’t like waiting to have their problems solved, average first reply timecorrelates with customer satisfaction. In other words, the lower your average first response time, the more satisfied and engaged your customers will be.

Plan your staffing carefully to scale with your customer count. When SaaS companies are growing quickly, it’s a mistake to underestimate future support ticket volume. When planning your budget, hire and train support people before you need them.

13.平均分辨率时间

虽然很重要，但要快速响应用户，但要快速解决问题至关重要。平均分辨率时间是您的支持团队完全解决或关闭门票的平均时间。

Average resolution time is a stronger corollary to customer satisfaction and retention than first response time. After all, it doesn’t matter how quickly you respond to a ticket if you don’t resolve the ticket, too.

Calculate your average resolution time with the following formula (if your software doesn’t calculate it for you):

14.净启动子得分（NP）

您可以使用客户调查，尤其是净启动子分数来衡量客户满意度。NPS是衡量客户满意度和忠诚度的最受欢迎的指标。

But don’t just use NPS to measure your customers’ happiness with your products. Customer ratings are also necessary to evaluate your support team’s effectiveness. Also, it’s smart to measure your NPS after product updates to see which changes triggered a positive or negative response.

The NPS tells us the likelihood of a person to recommend a company or its product to someone else. NPS typically uses the 0-10 scale, where zero means they won’t ever recommend the product and 10 means they definitely would. The higher your NPS the better, as it indicates satisfied users who will likely stay with you over time.

Three categories of people can be distinguished:

• Detractors (respondents giving a 0-6 score)
• Passives (respondents giving a 7 or 8 score)
• Promoters (respondents giving a 9 or 10 score)

Calculating NPS isn’t as simple as averaging the ratings, so use software to do it. There are many tools that help you measure and calculate your NPS, including Drift, Delighted, and Promoter.io.

15. Number of Active Users

Active users means the number of people that are actively using your product. This metric is a benchmark to determine the health of a SaaS company’s customer base. More usage by more users is a strong sign of a healthy SaaS app.

But since usage patterns and frequency is appropriately different for different companies, there’s no universal measure of “good” versus “bad” usage. In other words, every company must define the usage that defines an active user:

• Is it certain features?
• Is it certain features used at a certain frequency?
• 必须活跃用户使用特性的组合吗be considered active?

不幸的是,没有标准答案;过y company is different.

As a best practice, you should define a user as active when they do something from which they have derived undeniable value. For most apps, that means they should do something beyond just logging in before counting them as active.

Depending on your business, you might want to define usage differently for your mobile and web apps. At Databox, our active users metric is split into “active web app users” and “active mobile users.” We count those separately as usage patterns are very different in each app.

Active users can be measured as daily active users (DAU), weekly active users (WAU) or monthly active users (MAU).

Improvement in these numbers is a good signal that your business is moving in the right direction. These numbers can help you identify the impact of key initiatives, including new marketing channels, sales approaches, and product enhancements. You can keep an eye on these numbers using aSaaS growth dashboard.

But some call DAU and MAU vanity metrics. They argue that a better indicator of success is retention, which tells you how sticky your product is and how many users return to it after their first experience.

One way to measure stickiness is to divide your daily active users by your monthly active users, as in the formula below:

A DAU/MAU ratio of 50% means your customers return 15 out of 30 days in a month. If it makes sense that using your software should be a daily habit, this is an excellent metric to calculate.

16.客户保留率

It’s quite obvious that you should build a product that people love and want to continue using. You won’t renew deals if your customers don’t use your product.

Customer retention rate can be defined as a metric that indicates the proportion of customers that have continued to use your product for a while. The opposite of retention ischurn—also known as customer attrition.

To calculate customer retention rate at the close of a month, look at repeat orders from repeat customers in the past month and compare these orders to numbers from two months before. Do not count new customers you acquired in the previous month.

For example, if the number of customers subscribed at the beginning of last month is 200, and the customers who continued subscribing at the end of last month is 170, the customer retention rate is 170 ÷ 200, or 85%.

17. Churn Rate

波动率是客户或subsc的比例ribers who leave during a given time period. It is often an indicator for customer dissatisfaction, cheaper and/or better offers from the competition, aggressive and successful marketing from the competition, or reasons outside of your control like business failure or strategy shifts.

Some customer churn is to be expected. But the greater the churn, the more capital is required for the business just to maintain its revenue. Churn can quickly sink a SaaS company.

What is a good churn rate? For SaaS companies, a5-7%annualchurn is considered acceptable. SaaS companies that sell to smaller businesses should expect higher churn, while SaaS companies that sell to enterprises should strive for very low customer churn.

Acquiring new customers is usually way more expensive than retaining existing ones. So, keep a sharp eye on customer churn rate and identify the reasons for it:

• Get in touch with your previous users and try to get as much information as you can about why they are leaving.
• Get ahead of churn by defining the usage levels that correlate to retention, and do your best to drive customers to that level of usage.
• 始终寻求新的方法来为客户提供更多价值，以改善保留率。

Your goal should eventually be to achieve negative revenue churn. To accomplish this, prevent customers from unsubscribing while also finding ways to increase revenue from your existing customers. The increased revenue from existing customers should offset the revenue lost when others cancel.

Negative churn happens when the expansion revenue from existing customers is higher than lost revenue from churning customers. This is the case when your existing customers expand their use of your product by:

• purchasing add-ons
• upgrading to higher plans
• increasing their lifetime value to such an extent that it makes up for any revenue lost to other customers churning

If a company loses 5% of customers to churn each month, but the 95% of remaining customers are so successful with the product that they purchase additional services and increase their spends by 5%, revenue retention would be 110% compared to the previous month.

To calculate churn, you must use data from your accounting and/or CRM system. Ideally, these two systems are integrated so that you can pull data from either place.

浏览这些SaaS搅动仪表板示例为了获得有关您流失率的实时见解。

18. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

客户寿命价值（LTV）是了解客户的最重要指标之一。它可以帮助您做出有关销售，营销，产品开发和客户支持的业务决策。

要计算客户LTV，您首先必须计算客户的寿命：

例如，如果您的monthlycustomer churn is 5%, then your customer lifetime is 20 months (1 / 0.05). If yourannualcustomer churn is 25% your customer lifetime is four years (1 / 0.25).

Once you know your customer lifetime, you can calculate your customer LTV. The simplest formula is:

If yourARPAis $100 and the customer lifetime is 20 months, your LTV is $2000.

As you can see, churn has a direct impact on LTV. If you can halve your churn rate, it will double your LTV.

LTV对于发现SaaS公司的商业模式是否可行也很重要。在平衡业务模型中，CAC超过了LTV，而在平衡模型中，CAC大大低于LTV。

How to Easily Monitor Your SaaS KPIs and Metrics

Steering one’s business without measurable success indicators is like steering a car in the dark without dashboard lights: you might be going the right direction, but you have no idea how fast or when you’ll get there.

If these SaaS KPIs are the most important metrics for your business, you may want to be able to check them anytime, anywhere. And you’ll also want to know if something changes, when it changes, and why it changes.

However, that’s hard for most SaaS businesses. At Databox, we sometimes feel like we spend as much time building software to run our SaaS business as we do working on the SaaS product we sell. But we don’t have to do that for reporting, and we don’t think you should either.

With Databox, you can pull all your dispersed data quickly into one place and have all your dataavailable wherever you want it. There are70+ one-click integrations, you can connect to SQL databases likeAWS Redshift, andMySQL, or you can bring your data from电子表格.

你甚至可以得到一个18beplay with your most important KPIs, and for more dynamic metrics, you can define a set ofalerts(to receive via email orSlack) that let know when something goes wrong—or when something goes wonderfully!

Sign up for a free account今天，或建立您的第一个SaaS metrics dashboardwith ourmetric tracking softwareand let us know how we can help you grow your SaaS business as we grow ours.