1) The document discusses lessons learned about digital analytics on a budget from a startup perspective. 2) It explains how technologies that used to be expensive, like extracting and analyzing user data, are now cheaper and more accessible using open source and cloud-based solutions costing under $10k per year. 3) The document recommends showing metrics that comply with industry standards over proprietary systems, and using standard metrics to understand declines and make data-driven decisions.

1. Digital Analytics on a shoestring
An experience from
the startup world
Xavier Sansó
Global Business Events
Whittlebury Hall, 07 May 2014

2. Your presenter today
• CFO of Upptalk – a voice over IP MVNO (mobile virtual
network operator)
• … And a digital immigrant!

3. &
The initial challenge
Millions of users
interacting with a
mobile application
Millions of phone
calls and messages
per dayis
Meaning: Big data, big time

4. Lessons learnt

5. Paradigm 1: Information technology that used to be expensive is now
cheap and (partially) open source
Extract user and call data in order to measure
operational and market indicators
But they use complex, proprietary, expensive systems
Same thing.
But the technology has been commoditized
Put on the cloud
Made almost open source
The cost is below EUR 10K per year

6. Paradigm 2: Don’t show me metrics from your proprietary systems,
show me something that the industry recognizes as a standard
• A quarterly update from a company like Apple contains
data from their proprietary systems “we sold 1 million
iPads” and from industry standards “our market share
according to Nielsen was 42%”
• In the purely digital industries, standards matter more
and more, and proprietary systems are becoming
irrelevant
• But the same metric (eg number of users) measured
through an industry standard (eg Localytics) can mean
different things even for players in the same industry
• Work the standard back, make sure you understand it,
don’t challenge it much.

7. Paradigm 3: So you went to the standard, and last month your new
users declined by 20%...what’s next? Making sense of what seems not
to make sense
Accessed
registration
screen: 1000
Entered
personal data:
650
Validated
phone
number:
620
Received
verification
code
590
Code
correct:
300
New
user
Code
wrong:
250
Abandon:
40Did not
receive code
30
Abandon:
20
Wrong
phone
number:
10
Abandon: 350
Stay data driven. Be systematic

8. Paradigm 4: This industry still has very significant information gaps
Physical Interaction Tracking
Web analytics platforms still not good enough
at providing off the shelve tracking
capabilities for wipes, pinches, touches…
right hand and left hand!
Video engagement tracking. We still don’t
know (cheaply and as a standard) how users
interact with videos…yet videos are becoming
increasingly important
Someone in Silicon Valley will become rich over this

9. Paradigm 5: If it can be cloud-based and externally managed…it will
be…but do you really own your information?
The death of databases
ERP
Operational
Usage
Advertising
Dashboards
KPI
MIS

10. Thank you