SaaS and Digital Product Metrics: What to Track in Subscriptions, Marketplaces, Online Stores and Apps

Product metrics are a handful of numbers that show whether a business is growing: are new customers coming in, are they finding value, are they coming back and are they paying? Each business model has its own set of metrics: SaaS lives on subscriptions and churn, a marketplace on the balance between sellers and buyers, an online store on repeat orders. Below is a cheat sheet for five digital product models and a simple way to choose metrics for your own project.

How a metrics system is structured

To avoid drowning in numbers, metrics are organised on two levels.

The North Star Metric. One number that best shows whether customers are getting value from the product. If it grows, the business grows. For a booking service, it's the number of successful bookings; for a task tracker, the number of teams closing tasks every week.

The AARRR funnel. The customer journey is split into stages, with 1–2 metrics chosen for each:

• Acquisition — where people come from and how much each new customer costs.

• Activation — whether a person reached the first result they came for.

• Retention — whether they come back after a week, a month, six months.

• Revenue — how much money they bring and how much they cost to serve.

• Referral — whether customers bring other customers.

The North Star is watched constantly; funnel metrics show at which stage a problem lies.

B2B SaaS metrics

Subscription services for companies: CRMs, task trackers, accounting and booking systems, corporate messengers. The company buys, employees use it, and decisions take time.

• North Star: the number of active companies that regularly perform the key action — managing deals, closing tasks, taking bookings.

• Acquisition: leads, qualified leads (matching in size and need), cost per lead, conversion between sales stages (lead → demo → pilot → contract), deal length.

• Activation: share of companies that completed setup, time to first value, number of colleagues invited to the service.

• Retention: monthly company churn and revenue churn, share of active employees within an account, return after 30 and 90 days.

• Revenue: MRR and its structure — new, expansion (the customer upgraded or added seats), contraction, churn; average revenue per account (ARPA), CAC, LTV, the LTV/CAC ratio and CAC payback period.

• Service: NPS, support requests per customer, response time, service availability.

The most important thing for B2B SaaS is expanding revenue within existing customers. If companies grow and buy more seats or higher plans, the business can grow even with a modest flow of new customers. We covered how to structure plans to make this work in How to Monetise SaaS.

B2C SaaS metrics

Subscription services for individuals: notes, learning, design, fitness, file storage. Purchase decisions are quick, users are many, and most don't pay.

• North Star: the number of paying users or the number of active weeks per user.

• Acquisition: new sign-ups, CAC by channel, share of users who came through referrals.

• Activation: onboarding conversion, time to the first key action, share of users who reach the "moment of value" — for example, creating a first project or completing a first lesson.

• Retention: day 1, day 7 and day 30 retention, subscription churn, session frequency.

• Revenue: conversion from free plan or trial to paid, ARPU (average revenue per user) and ARPPU (per paying user), MRR, LTV, share of failed charges and renewals.

Payment errors deserve separate attention: in subscription services a noticeable part of churn is not customers leaving but a failed automatic charge that nobody retried.

Marketplace metrics

Platforms where sellers meet buyers, or contractors meet clients. The key feature is that the product has two audiences, and metrics are calculated for each separately.

• North Star: the number of successful transactions per period.

• Acquisition: new sellers and new buyers, acquisition cost for each side.

• Activation: for a seller, the first listing or product; for a buyer, the first purchase.

• Retention: share of repeat purchases, how many sellers remain on the platform after a month and after a year.

• Revenue: GMV (total value of all transactions on the platform), the platform's commission as a percentage of turnover, average order value, buyer and seller LTV.

• Platform balance: ratio of buyers to sellers, share of turnover held by the largest sellers, share of requests that ended in a transaction.

If there are many buyers but few offers, people leave empty-handed. If there are many sellers but no demand, sellers leave. That's why balance between the sides matters more for a marketplace than growth on one side.

Online store metrics

• North Star: orders per customer over a period. The period depends on the purchase cycle: a week for groceries, a quarter for clothing.

• Acquisition: traffic, visitor-to-order conversion, customer acquisition cost.

• Activation: add-to-cart rate, cart abandonment rate, checkout conversion.

• Retention: share of repeat purchases, conversion from first to second order, customer churn.

• Revenue: revenue, average order value, margin after delivery, discounts and returns, LTV.

• Operations: delivery time, stock availability, return rate, ratings and reviews.

The key moment is the second order. A customer who comes back even once is very likely to become a regular, so conversion to the second order is worth tracking separately.

Mobile app metrics

A mobile app is more of a channel than a business model: behind it there may be a subscription, a store or a marketplace. But apps have their own metrics worth adding to the model's metrics.

• North Star: depends on the purpose — time in app for entertainment, monthly active users (MAU) for communication services, share of goals achieved for learning and health.

• Acquisition: installs, cost per install (CPI), install-to-registration conversion.

• Activation: first session and first key action, share of users who delete the app on day one.

• Retention: day 1, day 7 and day 30 retention, "stickiness" — the ratio of daily to monthly active users (DAU/MAU).

• Revenue: conversion to paying users, ARPPU, MRR for subscriptions.

• Quality: crash-free session rate, loading speed, ratings and reviews in the App Store and Google Play.

How to choose metrics for your product

1. Identify your model. Subscription, commission on turnover, product sales — the set of metrics depends on the model.

2. Define your North Star. One number that grows only if customers get value.

3. Pick 1–2 metrics for each funnel stage. At the start, 6–8 metrics are enough. The rest can be added later.

4. Build analytics into development. Key events — sign-up, first action, payment, cancellation — should be described in the specification and tracked before launch. Otherwise, a month after release there will be nothing to measure.

5. Look at cohorts, not averages. Compare users who joined in different months: this shows whether the product is getting better.

6. Review your metrics. At the MVP stage, activation and retention matter most; at the growth stage, acquisition economics and revenue expansion.

If your product is just launching, start with an MVP and decide in advance which numbers you'll use to judge success. Read more in What Is an MVP, and about turning metrics into money in ROI of a Digital Product.

Common mistakes

• Vanity metrics. Sign-ups or downloads look good but say nothing about the business if people don't reach value and don't come back.

• Averages instead of cohorts. Average churn over all time hides the fact that new users leave faster than old ones — or the other way round.

• Too many metrics. Nobody looks at a dashboard with 40 charts. Better to have 8 numbers the team actually makes decisions on.

• No event tracking. Analytics were connected after launch, and the first months of data are lost.

• Mixed segments. Large and small customers, paying and free users behave differently. Their metrics are worth calculating separately.

FAQ

What is a North Star Metric

The product's main metric: one number that best shows customers are getting value. It helps the whole team understand where to go: if a decision doesn't affect the North Star, it has lower priority.

How many metrics do you need at the start

Usually the North Star plus 6–8 funnel metrics, one or two per stage, is enough to see where the product is losing users.

What is the difference between ARPU and ARPPU

ARPU is average revenue across all users, including free ones. ARPPU is average revenue from paying users only. For services with a free plan, it's important to watch both: the first shows the economics of the whole base, the second the value of a paying customer.

Which matters more: acquisition or retention

For subscription products, retention. If customers leave before their acquisition cost pays back, more traffic only increases losses. First achieve stable retention, then scale acquisition.

When should analytics be set up

Before launch. Key events should be described in the specification and tracked in the first version of the product, so you see real data from day one.

Launching a SaaS or another digital product and want the right analytics from the start? Take a look at our case studies and request a proposal — we'll help you choose metrics, set up event tracking and build a dashboard in the very first version. We explained how SaaS itself works in What Is SaaS.