Product metrics help you understand how people use your product. They show who your users are, how often they return, and whether they stick around. These core metrics form the basis for measuring engagement, growth, and product health.

Engagement Metrics

Engagement metrics show how active your users are over different time periods.

• Daily Active Users (DAU): The number of unique users who use your product in a single day. This helps you track daily habits and short-term activity.

• Weekly/Monthly Active Users (WAU/MAU): The number of unique users over a 7-day or 30-day period. These metrics show your product’s reach and sustained usage.

• Stickiness (DAU / MAU Ratio): This ratio measures how often monthly users return on a daily basis. A higher ratio signals stronger engagement and product relevance. Products with high stickiness often show signs of habit-forming behavior and strong product-market fit.

• Number of New Users per Month (MNU): The number of new users added in a month. A useful signal for growth and the success of your acquisition efforts.

User Behavior Patterns

Behavior metrics show how users interact with your product and how much value they get from it.

• Utilization: Measures how often users engage with your key features. High utilization means people are using what you built.

• Frequency: Shows how regularly users return. Frequent use often points to a strong product fit.

Feature Adoption and Product Value

• Feature Adoption Rate: The percentage of users who use a particular feature. This helps you understand which parts of your product are most valuable.

• Time to Value (TTV): Measures how quickly users experience the core benefit of your product after signing up. A shorter TTV often leads to higher retention and satisfaction.

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Captures how likely users are to recommend your product. A leading indicator of customer loyalty and word-of-mouth growth.

• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Measures how satisfied users are with a specific experience, such as a support interaction or feature release.

• Customer Health Score: Combines multiple signals like product usage, support tickets, and payment activity to assess the overall health of a user account.

Retention shows how well your product keeps users coming back. Churn reveals where users drop off. Together, these metrics help evaluate product stickiness, long-term value, and the effectiveness of onboarding and engagement strategies.

• Churn Rate: The percentage of users who continue using your product over time. A healthy retention rate means users are finding long-term value.

• Retention Rate: The percentage of users who stop using your product within a set period. A rising churn rate may suggest usability or value gaps.

• Monthly Churned Users (MCUv): The total number of users who left in a given month. This adds context to the churn rate by showing the actual size of the drop.

Cohort Retention Analysis

Tracks how different groups of users (cohorts) behave over time based on a shared starting point, such as the month they signed up. Cohort analysis reveals patterns that averages often hide.

For example, you might see a sharp drop in the first week or a steady retention curve after onboarding. This helps you pinpoint when users leave and assess whether recent product changes are improving retention for new users.

The North Star Metric is the single most important measure of the value your product delivers to customers. It acts as a guiding point for your entire organization, aligning teams around a shared goal and focusing daily work on what drives long-term growth.

A strong North Star Metric reflects real customer value, predicts business success, and is directly influenced by product decisions. It is not a vanity metric. It is a strategic compass that helps teams prioritize and stay aligned on impact.

Types of North Star Metrics

• Revenue: Direct financial impact, measuring how much money your product generates. Best for products with clear monetization models.

• Growth Efficiency: Balances growth with sustainability, often combining acquisition with retention or engagement quality.

• Customer Growth: Focuses on expanding your user base, measuring new customer acquisition or market penetration.

• Consumption Growth: Tracks how much customers use your product, indicating value realization and engagement depth.

• Engagement Growth: Measures the quality and frequency of user interactions, reflecting product stickiness and user satisfaction.

• User Experience: Focuses on satisfaction, ease of use, and overall user sentiment through metrics like NPS or user satisfaction scores.

5 Key Criteria for North Star Metric

1. It reflects the value users get from the product

2. It is a leading indicator of sustainable growth

3. It aligns with your overall product and business strategy

4. It is measurable and clearly defined

5. It cannot be moved by one-time efforts or shallow engagement

While helping Google product teams define UX metrics, we noticed that our suggestions tended to fall into five categories:

• Happiness: measures of user attitudes, often collected via survey. For example: satisfaction, perceived ease of use, and net-promoter score.

• Engagement: level of user involvement, typically measured via behavioral proxies such as frequency, intensity, or depth of interaction over some time period. Examples might include the number of visits per user per week or the number of photos uploaded per user per day.

• Adoption: new users of a product or feature. For example: the number of accounts created in the last seven days or the percentage of Gmail users who use labels.

• Retention: the rate at which existing users are returning. For example: how many of the active users from a given time period are still present in some later time period? You may be more interested in failure to retain, commonly known as “churn.”

• Task success: this includes traditional behavioral metrics of user experience, such as efficiency (e.g. time to complete a task), effectiveness (e.g. percent of tasks completed), and error rate. This category is most applicable to areas of your product that are very task-focused, such as search or an upload flow.

UMUX-Lite

UMUX-Lite (Usability Metric for User Experience) is a simplified, two-question survey that quickly measures perceived usability and user satisfaction. It's particularly useful for teams wanting to track user experience as their North Star without complex measurement overhead.

AARRR is a simple but powerful framework for understanding the full customer journey. Created by Dave McClure, it helps teams track how users discover your product, experience its value, return, and eventually contribute to growth and revenue.

Each stage builds on the one before it, revealing where users drop off and where your product delivers value. By measuring performance across all five stages, product teams can prioritize improvements that have the greatest impact.

The Five Stages

1. Acquisition: Tracks where users come from and how they find your product. This includes paid channels, organic search, referrals, partnerships, and other sources. Strong acquisition metrics show that your positioning and messaging are working.

2. Activation: Measures how many users have a successful first experience. This could be completing onboarding, using a core feature, or reaching a key milestone. High activation indicates that new users understand your product’s value early on.

3. Retention: Looks at whether users come back after their first visit. Retention is often tracked at set intervals like day 1, day 7, and day 30. Improving retention helps increase lifetime value and long-term growth.

4. Referral: Captures how often users recommend your product to others. This includes word-of-mouth, social sharing, and referral programs. High referral rates signal strong satisfaction and trust.

5. Revenue: Measures how and when users convert into paying customers. This includes initial purchases, upgrades, renewals, and upsells. Healthy revenue metrics show that your product delivers enough value for users to pay for it.

Some teams also use an extended version called AAARRR, which adds an Awareness step before Acquisition to track how many people you reach through campaigns, impressions, and brand exposure. This step was not part of the original AARRR funnel but is useful when looking at top-of-funnel marketing performance.

Vanity metrics are numbers that look impressive but don’t always reflect meaningful progress. They can create a false sense of success by focusing on surface-level activity rather than real engagement or business outcomes.

These metrics are often used in marketing or reporting to highlight growth, but they rarely guide decision-making. While they have value in certain contexts, they should not be mistaken for indicators of product health or user value.

Common Vanity Metrics

• Registrations: Total sign-ups, app downloads, or account creations. This shows interest but does not reveal whether users actually engage with the product.

• Installs: The number of times your app is downloaded or software is installed. High install counts mean little if users don’t return or take action.

• Email Database Size: The total number of email subscribers. A large list looks good, but what matters is how many people open, click, or convert from those emails.

• Social Media Metrics: Followers, likes, and shares across platforms. These may indicate brand reach, but they don’t tell you how users interact with the product or contribute to revenue.

Vanity metrics often stick around because they are easy to collect, grow quickly, and look impressive in reports. They can help boost team morale or satisfy stakeholder expectations, but they rarely provide insight into product performance. The real risk is that teams may focus on numbers that look good while core metrics like engagement, retention, or revenue are trending in the wrong direction.

Red Flags to Watch

• Rising sign-ups with flat or declining engagement: New users are arriving, but not finding enough value to stay or explore.

• High social following with low click-through rates: Your audience may be growing, but the connection to your product is weak.

• Frequent installs with low retention: You’re attracting attention, but users are not returning after the first experience.

Making Vanity Metrics Actionable

To make vanity metrics actionable, pair them with behavior-based measures. Track how many sign-ups activate. Measure how many social followers convert to trials. Focus on what users do, not just how many they are. The goal is to link every metric back to user value and product outcomes.

Startups operate in fast-paced environments where speed, focus, and adaptability are critical. Beyond traditional product metrics, startups benefit from tracking operational indicators that reflect how quickly they can ship, learn, and grow.

Operational Velocity Metrics

• Product Metabolism: Measures how often new products or features are released. A high metabolism reflects your team’s ability to ship quickly and stay competitive.

• Process Improvement: Tracks how frequently existing features or workflows are refined. Regular updates signal a culture of learning and continuous improvement.

• Decision Making Speed: Captures how quickly teams reach and act on decisions. Fewer delays mean faster feedback loops and better responsiveness.

• Implementation Speed: Measures the time between decisions and execution. Shorter cycles reflect strong alignment and operational discipline.

Growth and Unit Economics

• Viral Coefficient: The number of new users brought in by each existing user. A coefficient above 1 indicates that growth is happening organically.

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The total cost of acquiring a new customer. This includes marketing, sales, and onboarding efforts. Startups must optimize CAC early to scale efficiently.

• Lifetime Value (LTV): The total revenue expected from a customer over their time with the product. When LTV is at least three times greater than CAC, growth becomes more sustainable.

• Churn Rate: The percentage of users or customers who stop using the product. Reducing churn is critical before scaling acquisition.

Fluency with Data

Measuring Progress, KPIs

Unit Economics

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Startups can also apply the AARRR framework to identify and improve weak points in the user journey, from first touch to monetization.

SaaS products rely on recurring revenue and long-term customer relationships. Tracking the right metrics helps teams understand product performance, predict growth, and improve retention.

Revenue and Growth Metrics

• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): The total predictable revenue from active subscriptions each month. MRR reflects both growth momentum and revenue stability.

• Average Revenue Per User (ARPU): The average amount of revenue generated per customer. Useful for tracking pricing effectiveness and identifying upsell opportunities.

• Net Revenue Retention (NRR): Measures how revenue from existing customers changes over time, including upgrades and downgrades. A high NRR shows that customers are growing with your product.

• Gross Revenue Retention (GRR): Similar to NRR but excludes expansion revenue. GRR reflects your ability to retain customers without relying on upsells.

Unit Economics

• CAC:LTV Ratio: The balance between acquisition cost and customer value. A healthy SaaS business typically maintains a ratio of 3:1 or higher.

• Churn Rate: Tracks the percentage of customers who cancel in a given period. SaaS companies monitor both customer churn and revenue churn to understand the full impact.

Business Goals Ownership

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Engagement and Adoption

• Feature Adoption: Measures how often customers use specific features. High adoption indicates product relevance and can inform roadmap priorities.

• Product Engagement: Reflects how frequently and deeply users interact with the product. Active engagement often leads to better retention and expansion.

SaaS success depends on maintaining strong retention, expanding revenue from existing users, and acquiring new customers at a sustainable cost. Each metric offers insight into a different piece of that equation.

Tracking product metrics requires the right tools to capture user behavior, identify trends, and guide decision-making. While each tool has its strengths, most product teams combine multiple sources to get a complete picture of how users engage with their product.

Product teams use tools like Google Analytics, Amplitude, and Mixpanel to track how users find, engage with, and stay with their product.

• Google Analytics is useful for tracking traffic, user acquisition, and top-of-funnel activity. It shows where users come from and how they move through your site or app.

• Amplitude focuses on user behavior, helping teams understand what drives retention, which features matter most, and how cohorts evolve over time.

• Mixpanel offers real-time event tracking, path analysis, and conversion insights. It’s a strong tool for monitoring activation and usage patterns.

Used together, these tools help teams connect acquisition with engagement and retention.