10 Must-Track User Onboarding Metrics & KPIs (2024)
- December 12, 2022
New user onboarding is the first step in creating customer loyalty. An effective user onboarding flow engages new users, guides them through the core features of a product, helps with account setup, and reduces time-to-value.
While this may sound simple, product teams must analyze their new user flows with the right onboarding metrics and insights to measure their effectiveness. Key new user onboarding metrics and KPIs empower you with data to uncover what is working for your users and what isn’t, enabling you can make the appropriate product improvements.
In this article, we’ll break down why measuring onboarding user flows is critical, what behaviors are crucial, what metrics you should be tracking, and what you can do with that user data to make informed decisions.
What are the most critical user onboarding metrics to measure in 2024?
- Product adoption rate
- Time-to-value
- Onboarding completion rate
- DAUs, WAUs, MAUs
- User retention
- User churn
- Feature adoption rate
- Funnel analysis
- User support request rate
- Product NPS
The Importance of Measuring User Onboarding Metrics
The product onboarding process is your user’s first experience with your tool or product. You’ve sold them on the benefits you can deliver, but now it’s time to show them you mean what you say.
During the user onboarding process, your team needs to come together to ensure they’re appropriately educated on how to use your tool, what it can do for them, and that they have a positive experience working with your company.
Product teams can do that by following user onboarding best practices and having a user behavior analysis strategy in place. Analytics help you measure your onboarding flows’ effectiveness at driving product adoption and setting your new users up for success.
Measuring user onboarding can help you:
- Identify gaps in your onboarding process that may contribute to user frustration, product friction areas, and overall confusion.
- Reduce complications and pain points to reduce customer churn.
- Find opportunities to connect or engage with new users to build stronger relationships.
- Understand what areas of the onboarding checklist are consuming the most of your user’s time and attention.
- Optimize your onboarding process to achieve higher user adoption rates.
With this onboarding data, you gain valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of your user onboarding process and can use the data you’ve captured to make changes to improve it. This helps you increase user engagement, reduce churn, and improve the overall success of your product, whether it’s a simple B2C mobile app or a complex B2B SaaS product.
10 Must-Track User Onboarding Metrics & KPIs in 2024
While each product and onboarding flow will have contextual, unique insights to track, there are baseline user onboarding KPIs every product team should be benchmarking, measuring, and improving.
Here are the top ten essential user onboarding metrics you should track in 2024.
1. Product adoption rate
Product adoption happens when a new customer achieves their “aha!” moment with your product, finds real value in it, and commits to using your product or service. It often goes hand-in-hand with active users.
To find your product adoption rate, take your number of new active users and divide it by the number of sign-ups. Multiply by 100.
Product adoption rate = (New active users / Total sign-ups) x 100
Product adoption metrics helps you separate users invested in your product from those that just sign up and never return.
In an ideal world, all new sign-ups would become invested active users. But if you find that too many individuals are signing up for your product and failing to adopt it, it could point to an issue with onboarding or even marketing and sales.
2. Time-to-value
Time-to-value measures the time between when a new user signs up for your product and when they achieve their pre-determined value. In other words, time-to-value tells how quickly you can meet your new users’ needs.
“Value” can mean several different things depending on what you offer and who your customer is. You may also want to track multiple time-to-value metrics, such as “time to basic value” and “time to exceed value”.
What’s important to know is that you want time-to-value to be as fast as possible. Your onboarding should be simple, straightforward, and practical enough to help your users reach value quickly.
3. Onboarding completion rate
Onboarding completion rate is the percentage of users that reach the end of your onboarding workflow. You want as many users as possible to make it through the entire process.
That being said, what counts as “completed” can be flexible. If your onboarding process is relatively low-touch, you might not need your users to engage with each piece of onboarding content to count as complete.
An overly complex or lengthy onboarding process could lead to a low onboarding completion rate. However, having a 100% completion rate but an onboarding process that isn’t thorough enough can be just as bad for customer retention.
4. DAUs, WAUs, MAUs
Daily active users (DAU), weekly active users (WAU), and monthly active users (MAU) tell you how many customers are engaging with your product during that period.
Knowing how active your users are giving you a good representation of how well your product meets their needs, and how often they require your services. How you define an “active” user is up to you — but it might include completing a specific activity or engaging with a particular feature.
As an onboarding metric, you can see how different onboarding strategies or plans enhance (or diminish) your number of active users. Better onboarding could encourage users to engage with your platform more frequently.
5. User retention
User retention is the ticket to growth. The onboarding process is crucial for meeting user needs and keeping them satisfied.
To find user retention, divide your number of active users at the end of a given time period by the total number of active users at the beginning of that same time period.
User retention = (Number of at end of time period / Number of users at beginning of time period) x 100
If you find that users aren’t sticking around for a least a couple of months, your onboarding is most likely to blame. If customers leave just as quickly as they arrive, take a closer look at what resources you’re providing them during the onboarding process.
6. User churn
User churn and user retention rate are different sides of the same coin. User retention measures how many users stick around while user churn determines how many users leave.
Your user churn can be found by dividing the number of customers lost by the total number of customers you started with.
User churn = (Lost customers / Total number of starting customers) x 100
Like your retention rate, customers quickly churning could point to issues with your onboarding process. You need those customers to stick around if you want to grow, so look at how you can improve your onboarding process to reduce churn.
7. Feature adoption rate
Feature adoption rate is similar to product adoption rate, but it looks at specific features rather than your product as a whole. Measuring feature adoption rate can help you identify what offerings your users aren’t interested in or where they might need additional support.
During the onboarding process, ensure you’re giving all your features equal attention. If some features are more advanced or require your users to know the basics first, call attention to that.
Continuous onboarding and education materials can help introduce new features when the timing is right.
8. Funnel analysis
Funnel analysis is a process used to understand each step of the onboarding funnel better. The goal is to find specific parts of the process where users might drop out.
You can analyze your funnel by breaking your onboarding process into clear phases. Measure the number of users that move between each phase. It’s expected that a few will drop out at various points in the process, but if there is a significant jump between one phase and the next, it could point to an issue with that phase.
Use funnel analysis to identify the areas you need to zoom in on. You’ll want additional metrics or analytics to get a complete picture of your users’ behavior, but funnel analysis can point you in the right direction of where to start.
9. User support request rate
Funnel analysis is a process used to understand each step of the onboarding funnel better. The goal is to find specific parts of the process where users might drop out.
You can analyze your funnel by breaking your onboarding process into clear phases. Measure the number of users that move between each phase. It’s expected that a few will drop out at various points in the process, but if there is a significant jump between one phase and the next, it could point to an issue with that phase.
Use funnel analysis to identify the areas you need to zoom in on. You’ll want additional metrics or analytics to get a complete picture of your users’ behavior, but funnel analysis can point you in the right direction of where to start.
10. Product NPS
Net promoter score (NPS) measures customer satisfaction and how likely they are to advocate for your brand through product feedback. Your NPS is found by surveying your customers on how likely they are to recommend your product to someone in their circle.
If your average NPS score is too low, it’s a sign that your users aren’t delighted. This isn’t always an onboarding issue, but it could point to a lack of clarity or understanding of how to get the most out of your platform.
Get a better picture of your NPS by breaking users into different segments or categories. This will help you identify which users may need additional support and which are already happy with the way things are.
Analyze user behavior and track product usage with Whatfix Analytics
Enable your product managers to easily track and analyze user behavior and product usage with Whatfix Analytics, a no-code event tracking solution. With Whatfix Analytics, capture all user actions without engineering support, understand product usage, identify dropoff areas, understand feature adoption, map user journeys, build user cohorts, and make data-driven product decisions.
With a digital adoption platform (DAP) like Whatfix, product managers are empowered to analyze, build, and deliver effective user onboarding flows that help deliver them contextual in-app guidance and reduces their time-to-value.
With Whatfix’s no-code editor, product managers can build and publish in-app product tours, interactive walkthroughs, contextual guidance, self-help wikis, tooltips, task lists, and personalized experiences. Whatfix revolutionizes the onboarding experience, making it more engaging for new users with contextual, outcome-based adoption strategies.
With Whatfix Analytics, you can then analyze these product experiences and capture user insights to understand how effective each user flow, in-app guidance, and help content are, identify friction points, reduce confusion, and deliver better products – all with a codeless analytics implementation.
Whatfix also empowers customer and user feedback, with no-code tools to build and launch in-app surveys to collect qualitative feedback from various cohorts of users to understand, on an individual level, why users are using your product.
You can learn more about Whatfix for product adoption now!
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