Being a successful entrepreneur means being able to consider and balance everything from your clients’ perception of your startup to how much capital you need to continue developing the business. The problem with striking that balance is knowing about core startup metrics and how to measure what’s working and what’s not.

Taking a close look at what you can measure will help you keep a pulse on the viability of your startup and change the course if you see that something doesn’t work. There’s a vast array of software and systems you can explore to help you along the way; marketing tools (Google analytics for example) to collect all the data or key performance indicators to estimate your startup chances to succeed.

So what are these metrics and what key metrics in business do you need to use first?

Think ahead

If you’ve just started thinking about your success metrics and don’t know yet which are really important in your case, you should begin by researching metrics other companies in your industry use.

It doesn’t matter what you are launching — fintech, SaaS, ecommerce or media, there is always somebody who’s experienced this stage of a startup to some extent and can share their experience; you can almost always find experts to discuss what metrics will be better for your business.

Are You Measuring the Right Things?

Of course, every business is unique and each needs specific figures that need to be measured separately. For example, mobile products hinge largely on MAU/DAU, bounce rate is particularly important for media, average order value and the percentage of returning customers (or shopping cart abandonment rate) is huge for eCommerce sites etc.

But there are metrics that are standard for every online business that shouldn’t be ignored when launching a startup. Here is a list of basic metrics that will help you measure your startup success in terms of customer and business.

Business-Oriented Metrics

All website traffic — this is an essential metric that tells you how many people visit your website. This metric’s especially important if you run a blog or media portal, where your advertising revenue is largely dependent on number of visitors. Traffic also impacts other industries’ sales, in which case, you would want to examine from a lens of quality rather than quantity.

Conversion rate (CR) shows you the number of visitors who took a desirable action (filled form, registered, bought). Conversion metrics, important measures of profitability in sales, show you the result of your work.

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