DEPARTMENT OF MANAGEMENT SCIENCE & INNOVATION

COURSEWORK COVER AND FEEDBACK SHEET

Student Name (include all group members for group work): Deniz Ozalp

Degree Programme: MSc in Technology Entrepreneurship Module code and name: MSING030: New Venture Analytics Assignment number/title: Coursework 1 / Geckoboard Course Lecturer: Dr. Dave Chapman

Year of Study: 2 (part-time) 2013

Student Declaration
I/we have read and understood the College and Departmental statements and guidelines concerning plagiarism. I/we declare that this submission is entirely my/our own unaided work. Wherever published, unpublished, printed, electronic or other information sources have been used as a contribution or component of this work, these are explicitly, clearly and individually acknowledged by appropriate use of quotation marks, citations, references and statements in the text: I/we agree that work submitted electronically may be checked using the JISC detection service Turnitin®. Where work is submitted electronically, the work cannot be assessed unless both a hard copy and identical electronic versions have been submitted.

Signature: Deniz Ozalp

Date: 5 February 2013

Marker Comments

Date Received: Provisional Mark: Note of deductions:
First Marker Initials: Internal Examiner Initials:

NOTE: ALL MARKS ARE PROVISIONAL UNTIL CONFIRMED BY THE MS&I EXAM BOARD AND REGISTRARS

MSI 2009/10

MSING030: New Venture Analytics

Coursework 1

Key Metrics for Businesses

Introduction: What is ?

Geckoboard offers businesses a real time dashboard for monitoring their KPIs and other key data. It is a hassle to check multiple places in order to monitor the information that is highly important for understanding how your business is doing. Especially, when you are a start-up and you are trying to grow your business. You simply do not have the time. It is equally painful when you are running an established business. You have many other priorities such as maximising ROI. Business owners are not keen to check and monitor data on various platforms and then having to compile these in order to draw outcomes, reports and action plans. However, now there is a hassle-free solution: Geckoboard. Most of the services such as Google Analytics, Twitter, foursquare, Excel, Flurry, Facebook, Google+, PayPal and more that businesses use (or desire to use) daily are integrated in Geckoboard and with it all the key real time data that matters is available to view at a glance in one place. With Geckoboard we can see how healthy our business is in real time.

KPI’s, metrics and measuring what matters to your business
The key metrics to monitor and measure can be very different for start-ups or early stage enterprises in comparison to established growth stage businesses. Indeed it is powerful to have a tool that businesses can mould and customise according to their needs as well as the business lifecycle stage they are at.

Lifecycle of a Business
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Early stage start-up: Share & Wear and the metrics that matter
Share & Wear (www.share-n-wear.com) is a social styling network, which allows users to choose avatars and create outfit combinations with their existing clothes as well as new clothes from fashion brands online and to recommend styles to their friends. Users are able to select their avatars and create and save outfits using the photographs of clothes from fashion brands in our database. As Share & Wear is a very data-driven start-up there are many key metrics to monitor and measure. Having a comprehensive and personalised Geckoboard can help the founders of Share & Wear to focus on the most relevant aspects of their business. Taking un-informed and uncalculated decisions can damage the potential of the business to attract new customers plus can also result in the business not being able to reach the growth phase as quickly as desired.

The founders of Share & Wear are always considering both their partner fashion brands and also their users. Share & Wear’s revenue is generated through the affiliation fees that the partner fashion brands are charged as well as through the e-commerce services that are offered to particular brands. From a B2B point of view we have decided to focus on the following metrics as a priority: Revenue, Referral and Retention. From our interviews we know that our partner fashion brands want us to deliver more sales for them. Therefore we can identify the specific metrics and key data such as conversion rate, which we should monitor to ensure that we are on top of our targets. Our goal is to increase the affiliation fees that we charge our partner fashion brands as we grow our user base; hence we need to ensure that our partner brands are happy with our offering. We would also like to reach the stage where our partners are proud to display our logo on their homepage; hence generating referrals to Share & Wear. Most importantly we are focusing on retaining our partners by constantly making sure that the value they get is improved and in lines with the fast-paced and competitive industry. From a B2C point of view we are focusing on the following metrics as a priority above others: Activation, Retention and Revenue. We want to ensure that our website is very easy to use, so that we can achieve a higher percentage of user engagement. Our next big goal is to ensure that our users receive the value they desire above and beyond their expectations so that we can retain them. It is highly important for us to be able to view data on returning users such as how many days it took them to return to our website since their last visit and more as well as data about their journey on our website. We aim to reach a growth phase where users will see Share & Wear as their one-stop destination for buying new clothes matching their existing clothes and creating combinations online with the same existing and new clothes mixture for their friends and in turn generating increased commission income and affiliation return.

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At Share & Wear we can benefit from Geckoboard’s SendGrid. This widget will allow us to show off with our website stats once we achieve a reasonably high number of active users by displaying the following vanity type metrics scores on our business dashboard: Delivered Unsubscribes Invalid email Bounces Repeat unsubscribes Unique clicks Spam drop Repeat bounces Repeat spam reports Blocked Requests Spam reports Clicks Opens Unique opens

Transactional, Marketing and Mobile Emails, which SendGrid offers are amongst features that we are looking to use in order to create promotional campaigns for our partner fashion brands. Therefore reporting on the email campaigns will be equally important. Looking at the particular metrics this widget allows us to monitor we can identify which campaigns (if any) work better and we can segment our user base smarter and create more targeted campaigns. This information will also be communicated to our partner fashion brands too.

Share & Wear can highly benefit from the Google Analytics widget. Retention related metrics are exceptionally important for us as a start-up. We have already implemented the Google Analytics into our website to monitor how our visitors use our site. In the near future we will also be using this tool to measure sales and conversions. We can also see where the visitors are coming to our website from, which will help us validate the cost per acquisition. We can also identify strategies to achieve maximum number of returning users.

Google Analytics also displays the following for us:  Campaign information including Ad Clicks, Ad Cost, CPC, CPM, CTR and Impressions o This information can complement the previous vanity type metrics outcomes on our business dashboard and can represent a much more complete picture not only for our company board, but also for our partners.  E-commerce information including Total Item Revenue, Total Transaction Revenue, Number of Items Purchased and Number of Transactions o This key data makes it easier for our partners to understand the value they are getting from our product offering by visualisation.

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Flurry can help Share & Wear to monitor important mobile analytics. Share & Wear can benefit from accurately measuring audience reach, engagement, retention, conversions and revenue to better understand how users as well as fashion brands interact with Share & Wear’s IOS and Android mobile applications. Flurry tool can display the following data:    Number of active users o We can even draw comparisons between our web and mobile applications by using a mixture of Google Analytics and Flurry on our business dashboard. Location of active users Number of new users o We can segment our user base to optimise our welcome campaigns in order to announce popular features to new registrants. We can also monitor the welcome journey of our users and identify when they convert in comparison to their sign-up date. As a result we can validate campaigns and promotional offers that convert better. The daily mean or median user session length Retained user numbers o Retention is one of the most important metrics for us. Our goal is to become the most popular and most preferred style sharing network for our users and we can achieve this by maximising the returning users. Looking at Fred Wilson’s 30/10/10 rule we can see that benchmarking can be valuable. It is normal to expect that: 30% of users active once a month 10% of users active once a day 10% of daily users = max concurrent users Total page view count or the average page view count per session

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Flurry provides us with actionable metrics such as: unique users, profit, user activity / retention, cost per customer. These are important for us to also validate some of our costs.

Summary
Having a dashboard compiling the information indicating the health of our business is extremely useful for the employees, clients and board. There are many other widgets such as Twitter, Facebook, Excel, Trello, Magento, Google+ and more that Share & Wear can massively benefit from as a start-up, but it will not be feasible to discuss all the tools that can be used. Geckoboard continues to adapt to deliver tools that are in lines with the needs of the businesses they support.

A business that has achieved product / market fit: H&M
H&M is a Swedish multinational retail-clothing company, known for its fast-fashion clothing for men, women, teenagers and children. H&M exists in 43 countries and has 2,629 stores at end of August 2012. (Wikipedia, accessed on 05/02/2013) H&M recently launched a new online service called the Dressing Room (http://www.hm.com/gb/dressingroom/LADIES) that allows users to match H&M clothes that they don’t yet own from the current collection of H&M and create outfits on avatars that the users can choose. Initially H&M was very much focused on acquisition and user growth as valuable metrics to monitor and improve. Now they have achieved their target of reaching a large enough user base. Therefore they are becoming more and more focused on user engagement and improving the user experience as well as journey. H&M looks at the goals of the business such as increasing sales and retaining loyal customers and then considers which metrics can be used to measure how the goals of the business are being approached. H&M can also achieve better conversions, higher volume of sales and reduce the cost of acquision of new members by benefiting from the Geckboard business dashboard and its tools. Some of the tools that Geckoboard offers provide insight into the industry and market as well as how well the promotional and acquisition campaigns are performing. Looking at this real time data, which is available through the dashboard H&M can justify some of the costs. Furthermore, budget planning activities can be based on slightly more realistic data.

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Nima from Venio stated: “Without data, it is very hard to create real innovation.”. H&M is also extremely datadriven and they can therefore benefit from a number of tools that Geckoboard can offer. Seeing metrics measurements on the dashboard transparently helps businesses to react to things quickly. That’s another reason why H&M should be using the tools of Geckoboard.

H&M can benefit from the ActiveCampaign widget. Huge companies like H&M have massive marketing budgets, but it is nearly impossible to monitor the marketing campaigns and the results driven from them easily. It is often complicated and time consuming since the different pieces of information flows from different areas including a mixture of internal and external data warehouses. ActiveCampaign can help H&M to build a list and manage the subscribers more effectively. Plus ActiveCampaign assists with list growth and personalisation of your marketing for greater results. This tool displays:    details about the most recent subscriber added total number of subscribers subscriber interaction rate

Companies like H&M exist in highly competitive ecosystems. Even though their number one priority is to increase sales, they are also massively data driven. For companies like H&M having a continuous feed of information about their products and services will always be extremely useful.

H&M can also use Positionly, which is a powerful and very user-friendly tool gives you the opportunity to enjoy improving your website. With Positionly, H&M can monitor daily changes, the impact these changes have, measure SEO performance, and improve rankings easily. Positionly displays:  The current position of a set of keywords for a particular search engine, and its change since yesterday o This can in turn help H&M to track and target different keywords and gain a position advantage above their competitors. It is highly important for companies like H&M to appear organically in the search results for particular keywords and constantly keep updating these in order to ensure differentiation from their competitors. It is common that more companies target the keywords that deliver traffic and this also increases the cost of submitting those particular keywords that become very popular.

H&M needs a comprehensive analytics tool that can help them monitor and understand their site traffic in realtime. With this type of understanding achieved, decision makers and management board at H&M can be empowered to make informed decisions quickly and efficiently. Especially the fashion industry is very competitive and extremely fast-paced. If H&M does not have access to this feed of real time data then they might fall behind their competitors and lose a % of their market share. GoSquared provides the following information on the business dashboard:      Live visitor gauge Live visitor map Visitor timeline – Compare concurrent visitor numbers to the last 24 hours or the same time last week o This piece of data can allow H&M to track the changes and the impact these changes have on the experience of their users on their website Current referrers o It is also an advantage for H&M to have access to the current referrers data as they can use this data to accurately reward referrals. List of the current top visited pages
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List of the current top searches o Companies like H&M can highly benefit from specific data retrieved and sorted based on user activity. This shows the company what the users are searching for and willing to pay money for. Many product offerings can be improved through the exploration and analysis of this type of data recorded on the business dashboard. List of top keywords or queries from the last day to year Top sources Top content – a list of top landing pages or viewed content from the last day to year Top technology Average time on site Time on Site Funnel – Display a funnel of current visitors’ time spent on your site

Summary
As an established business it is also highly important to define metrics around acquisition. This metrics is not of such high priority in the start-up phase as businesses are much more focused on activation and retention. This is due to the fact that activation and retention metrics outcomes will validate the value proposition of the startup. However it is also important to note that established companies often fail to communicate the data displayed on their dashboards effectively to their organisation i.e. employees in various teams etc. Smaller organisations have an advantage as they can focus on monitoring this data that is made available in real time through many tools today. The essential core of the business is maximising ROI. However in today’s complexity it would not be sufficient enough to just say that to conclude. In today’s data-driven world, a lot depends on data. Through the data obtained better return on activities that organisations spend money, time and resources on can be achieved.

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References 1. Show us your board! A call for featured dashboards http://www.geckoboard.com/show-usyour-board-a-call-for-featured-dashboards Posted at 07/18/12 4:22 PM by Gareth Wilson 2. The Business Lifecycle: An Overview http://www.productiveflourishing.com/the-businesslifecycle-an-overview by CHARLIE GILKEY on JULY 8, 2010 3. Roundup of Data Driven London https://www.gosquared.com/blog/roundup-data-driven-london by James Gill 4. SendGrid http://www.geckoboard.com/sendgrid-widget Geckoboard Widget 5. How Venio uses Geckoboard to reach faster to changes http://www.geckoboard.com/featuredbusiness-dashboard-how-venio-uses-geckoboard-to-react-faster-to-changes Posted at 02/1/13 4:14 PM by Sofia 6. H&M http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%26M Accessed on 05/02/2013 7. H&M Dressing Room http://www.hm.com/gb/dressingroom/LADIES Accessed on 05/02/2013 8. How TokBox use Geckoboard to revolutionise how data is commercial within their organisation and beyond http://www.geckoboard.com/featured-business-dashboard-how-tokbok-usesgeckoboard-to-revolutionise-how-data-is-communicated-within-the-organisation-and-beyond Posted at 01/24/13 3:30 PM by Sofia 9. How Otto Hilska CEO at Flowdock uses Geckoboard to leverage real time data to improve customers’ experience http://www.geckoboard.com/interview-with-otto-hilska-ceo-at-flowdock Posted at 01/18/13 11:01 AM by Sofia 10. How Mobify uses Geckoboard to improve their customer feedback loop and product development http://www.geckoboard.com/featured-business-dashboard-how-mobify-usesgeckoboard-to-improve-their-customer-feedback-loop-and-product-development Posted at 01/11/13 10:20 AM by Sofia Appendix

New & Returning Visitors

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Likes & People Talking About This

Demographics & Location

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