What Is SaaS Data Analytics and Why Do You Need it?  

In today’s fast-paced business environment, where customer preferences rapidly evolve, organizations must constantly refine their products and services to meet changing demands.  

By harnessing the power of SaaS data analytics and utilizing intuitive dashboards, businesses can precisely identify areas for improvement in their offerings. These analytics and dashboards enable organizations to gain deep insights into customer behavior, market trends, and operational efficiencies, allowing them to enhance their products, optimize processes, and deliver exceptional experiences to their target audience. 

In this article, we will explore the world of SaaS analytics, from understanding its purpose and benefits to how to choose a data analytics solution for your SaaS business. 

What Is SaaS Analytics?

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) analytics refers to using software applications to collect, process, and analyze large volumes of data about your SaaS business and customers. This analytics process enables SaaS businesses to deeply analyze users’ actions throughout their entire journey, to enhance customer engagement and ultimately increase their recurring revenue streams. 

Try Slingshot

Why Do You Need SaaS Analytics?

To grow your business, you must stay ahead of your competition by understanding your SaaS product data, insights, implications, and, most importantly, understanding your customers. Here are the key reasons why you need SaaS analytics: 

• Uncovering insights: Using SaaS data analytics tools such as dashboards and techniques such as predictive analysis, businesses can reveal patterns, trends, and correlations that provide meaningful insights into customer behavior, market dynamics, and operational efficiency. These insights enable informed decision-making, allowing SaaS businesses to make strategic adjustments, identify growth opportunities, and optimize performance. 
• Enhancing offerings: By analyzing customer feedback, engagement metrics, and market trends, SaaS businesses can gain a deep understanding of their customer’s needs and preferences. This knowledge allows them to tailor their products or services to meet evolving demands effectively, ensuring customer satisfaction and loyalty. 
• Gaining a competitive edge: SaaS businesses that leverage the power of SaaS analytics can better understand their market position, competitors, and emerging trends. With access to these insights visualized through interactive, SaaS organizations can identify unique selling points, differentiate themselves from competitors, and develop effective strategies to outperform the market. 
• Data-driven decision-making: SaaS analytics coupled with user-friendly enable evidence-based decision-making by providing reliable and real-time data insights. By relying on data-driven decision-making, SaaS businesses can minimize uncertainties, evaluate performance, optimize resource allocation, identify growth opportunities, and improve operational efficiency. 

Throughout history, data analytics has consistently provided a competitive edge to SaaS businesses from various sectors and sizes, helping them become data-driven companies. And becoming a data-driven company is an undeniable need. Data analytics tools and technologies help SaaS and technology companies to thrive in product development, customer acquisition and retention, and operational efficiency. Not only does the use of data create an organizational data-driven culture, but it also drives growth in a rapidly evolving business world.  

What Metrics Should You Track for Your SaaS?

Monitoring and tracking appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs) is crucial for gaining insights into the performance and expansion of your SaaS business. There are endless amounts of data points you are gathering from your customers to better understand their behavior and the health of your business. The selection of metrics to include in your SaaS dashboard will vary based on your unique business goals. Nevertheless, these are the top 10 SaaS KPIs and metrics you need to track and monitor to gain valuable insights into your customers, the performance of your SaaS product and make informed decisions to enhance your business:  

• Product signups: Tracks how many people from those who have signed up to use your SaaS product, including free trial signups, could become paying customers.   
• Active users: This SaaS analytics KPI measures the number of unique users engaged with your product or service over time. It can help you understand your product’s reach and identify user engagement opportunities.  
• Monthly recurring revenue: This KPI showcases the total revenue generated by your SaaS product every month.  
• Churn rate: Measures the percentage of customers who cancel their subscriptions or stop using your product or service over a period. You need to pay close attention to this one, as you want to keep the churn rate as low as possible.   
• Net dollar retention: NDR (net dollar retention) is a SaaS KPI that measures the revenue retained from existing customers minus any lost revenue due to churn. 
• Customer acquisition cost: This SaaS KPI measures the amount of money your business spends on acquiring new customers. It can help you understand the efficiency of your marketing and sales efforts. 
• Customer lifetime value: Measures the total amount of revenue you can expect to generate from a single customer over their lifetime. This can help you understand the long-term profitability of your business. 
• Natural rate of growth: The NRG (natural rate of growth) SaaS KPI measures your business’s growth rate without any external factors to understand your organic growth potential. 
• Revenue churn: This SaaS KPI measures the revenue lost due to churn and can help you understand the financial impact of customer churn for your business. 
• Cash: Measures the amount of cash your business has at any given time. 

SaaS Data Analytics: What to Look for?

Having recognized the importance of SaaS analytics, the next step is determining the optimal means to monitor and track your KPIs and metrics effectively. This can be accomplished by utilizing data analytics tools or BI (business intelligence) solutions that facilitate seamless connectivity to your data.  

By leveraging these tools, you gain the ability to extract valuable insights, perform comprehensive analyses, and make informed decisions based on the wealth of data at your disposal. 

When you start looking for a SaaS data analytics solution for your business needs, you should compare the features of different vendors before choosing one. Here’s a list of the critical things you need to look for:    

• Data Integration: Your SaaS data analytics solution should be able to integrate with various data sources, including databases, cloud platforms, and third-party applications used by your SaaS businesses. It should also be capable of extracting, transforming, and loading data from these sources to create a unified and comprehensive data repository. 
• Customizable Dashboards and Reports: The solution you decide to partner with for your SaaS businesses should offer customizable dashboards and reports that allow users to visualize and monitor KPIs specific to their business. And apart from the customization ability, the dashboards and reports should also be interactive, providing drill-down capabilities, filtering options, and creating ad-hoc reports tailored to individual user requirements. 
• Advanced Analytics Capabilities: The solution should offer advanced analytics capabilities such as data modeling, dashboard linking, machine learning, forecasting, and annotation. These analytics features enable SaaS business users to gain deeper insights from data and make data-driven decisions. 
• Collaboration Functionalities: Collaboration functionalities allow users to share reports and dashboards with other business users and stakeholders and discuss performance, KPIs, and actions in the context of the data they are looking at.  
• Mobile Support: In today’s mobile-driven world, it is important to choose a SaaS data analytics solution that offers a native mobile app. This allows users to access and interact with data, dashboards, and reports on mobile devices, ensuring flexibility and on-the-go access to insights. 
• Data Governance and Security: When it comes down to security, you need to prioritize a SaaS data analytics solution that includes features like data encryption, access controls, and compliance with industry standards and regulations. 
• Scalability: The data analytics solution should be able to handle growing data volumes and user demands. 

To help you decide what SaaS data analytics tool to use, we have categorized solutions into four categories catering to specific business needs. By focusing on the particular category that aligns with your SaaS’s requirements, you can prioritize data analytics solutions that best address your needs and empower your team to leverage data-driven insights effectively. 

Saas data analytics for business users: These tools prioritize an intuitive and user-friendly interface, making them ideal for SaaS business users. They offer self-service analytics capabilities, enabling every team member to work with data, regardless of their expertise level.  

Examples: Tableau, Slingshot, Microsoft BI  

Low-cost/free SaaS data analytics: In this category, you’ll find budget-friendly data analytics solutions often offering free trial options. These tools allow SaaS businesses to explore their features and functionalities before committing to any financial investment.  

Examples: Qlik, Zoho Analytics   

Embedded SaaS analytics: Unlike traditional BI tools that require users to switch to separate applications for data insights, embedded analytics tools seamlessly integrate within existing workflow applications. This integration lets users access data visualizations and dashboards directly within their primary applications, providing context and convenience.  

Examples: Reveal, Domo   

SaaS data analytics for technical users: These data analytics solutions cater to technical users and provide advanced functionalities that may be challenging for regular business users to navigate and utilize effectively. While they may require a steeper learning curve, technical users can leverage these tools to delve deeper into data analysis and exploration.  

Examples: Sisense, Mode Analytics   

* If you’re currently shopping for a SaaS data analytics solution that is business user-friendly and at a low cost, check out Slingshot. While we may be biased (we are talking about our product, after all), Slingshot provides an easy-to-use interface and a set of productivity tools. With everything Slingshot offers, you can grow your SaaS business quickly and start hitting your revenue goals sooner. 

Why Slingshot Is the Right Data Analytics Tool for Your SaaS Business?

As a digital workplace centered around data, Slingshot presents several compelling reasons why it can be the ideal data analytics solution for SaaS businesses to monitor their KPIs and analyze their data for better-informed decision-making:  

• Integration with multiple data sources: Slingshot seamlessly integrates with your existing operational systems, SaaS platforms, databases, spreadsheets, cloud services, and APIs. It also provides full integration with Azure Machine Learning Studio, allowing you to select your data source, construct comprehensive visualizations, and connect to trained machine learning models. Additionally, Slingshot supports Google BigQuery, ensuring speed when processing large datasets with advanced analytics capabilities. 
• Creating insightful dashboards and visualizations: Slingshot streamlines the process of working with data and creating insightful dashboards, catering to users of all skill levels. Its intuitive interface empowers even non-technical users to effortlessly select relevant data fields, drag and drop them into separate sections, and instantly build visually appealing data visualizations. This feature is particularly valuable for SaaS businesses as it allows you to view data in context, monitor your SaaS KPIs and metrics in real time, and make well-informed decisions accordingly. 
• Collaborating and acting on data: Slingshot keeps all your KPIs, metrics, and dashboards in a centralized location where collaboration occurs. Users can share dashboards with team members, stakeholders, and external individuals. Users can also easily go from insight within a dashboard to a private chat, discussion, and task. Slingshot’s collaboration features are especially beneficial for SaaS businesses, enabling different teams, such as marketing, sales, and customer support, to access specific KPIs relevant to their roles while managing data access rights. 

• Data catalog: Eliminate silos by providing a centralized location to categorically house all your organization’s data and get the answers to your business questions at your fingertips. In Slingshot’s data catalog, data is neatly organized, indexed, and kept ready for use, so your business users can quickly and easily analyze and act on it.
• Pricing: Slingshot offers three plans designed to suit any SaaS team regardless of size, type of project, goals, and objectives. The software is free for smaller teams and starts at $12 per user in its paid version, bringing more features and unlimited options. 

Don’t waste another minute and start with Slingshot today. It’s free!   

Bring data to the center of your SaaS business and see how it fuels your growth in record time.