Intro to Monetization

Choosing data that matters

We’re sure you have loads of data available after leading your customers through the sales funnel but simply using all the data you have isn’t always the right move and if you don’t choose the right data to monetize, then you may as well not be monetizing at all. The right data can tell you a number of things like what your company needs to focus on or it shows you how your business is performing. Essentially, data that helps keep you on track is what should be monitored.

How data grows

Company’s must grow and as they do, so does their data. This year, iMonetize had a number of employees that make up several teams with each team focusing on different team level data. For every month, the finance team shares a monthly data report with over 40+ metrics on products, sales and successes that help define the business’s progress. Large companies tend to be more complex as the number of products, teams, customers and in turn data, grows every day. Our teams use intelligence tools and a data warehouse to monitor and build data metrics that help us understand which data sets are important for the business.

Your first years

Data isn’t always complex, we’ve taken a look at some of our data from when we first started to see how much they’ve grown over the last few years and all we’ve learned from it.
After examining our own data metrics, we’ve found that there are two key principles that help you pick the right ones.

1. Measure your rates instead of totals
2. Pick data with clear owners

Here’s how we learned this, after seeing a lot of big numbers the first few days. We were pretty excited but it soon wore off after we realized that these numbers weren’t all that helpful.

Avoid using totals

Gauging your data according to things like your total number of registered users was among the first mistakes we made. These numbers always grow but it doesn’t really help you. They’re good for the excitement but that’s it. What really matters is how much growth you see and you can’t get that by looking at totals alone. What you need to be targeting is the total number of signups you have each week as an indication of your data quality as it is also a reflection of your marketing efforts. Your dashboards should always show your success/failure rate as it lets you see which of your experiments worked and which didn’t so you learn what you should avoid doing. A good dashboard will show you what to improve and what to keep doing. Your connection rates and signups each weak are a stronger indication of your data’ s growth so you can spot when your growth rate begins to wane.

Use a time window

Choose a short time window to measure your rates so it’s easier to spot changes. You’ll see faster feedback depending on the volume of signups you get typically; you can decide how short you want your time window to be. It could be weekly, daily or hourly. A large company like WhatsApp sees about 700 sign ups a minute so it makes sense to measure their signup rates every few minutes to keep a handle on all the data they collect. For smaller companies that are still growing, a weekly time window makes for more stable results so you van harvest new data on your new members.

Goals

The one place where totals trump rates is in your company goals. Your goals for monetizing your data are a key part in generating more revenue and becoming more profitable so in this case, totals are important. Measuring your total monthly recurring revenue by splitting the metric into the different sources of revenue your company has like sales, marketing or self -service makes it possible for you to see which processes work and which ones don’t.
A great way to optimize your business functions and make your customers happier is by making it faster and smoother for them. You’ll get more customers through their referrals which translates into more data for you to monetize. Having the processes that need to be optimized for efficiency displayed on your dashboard puts it at the front of your company’s mind so you’re always thinking of ways to get better.