Book Image

API Analytics for Product Managers

By : Deepa Goyal
Book Image

API Analytics for Product Managers

By: Deepa Goyal

Overview of this book

APIs are crucial in the modern market as they allow faster innovation. But have you ever considered your APIs as products for revenue generation? API Analytics for Product Managers takes you through the benefits of efficient researching, strategizing, marketing, and continuously measuring the effectiveness of your APIs to help grow both B2B and B2C SaaS companies. Once you've been introduced to the concept of an API as a product, this fast-paced guide will show you how to establish metrics for activation, retention, engagement, and usage of your API products, as well as metrics to measure the reach and effectiveness of documentation—an often-overlooked aspect of development. Of course, it's not all about the product—as any good product manager knows; you need to understand your customers’ needs, expectations, and satisfaction too. Once you've gathered your data, you’ll need to be able to derive actionable insights from it. This is where the book covers the advanced concepts of leading and lagging metrics, removing bias from the metric-setting process, and bringing metrics together to establish long- and short-term goals. By the end of this book, you'll be perfectly placed to apply product management methodologies to the building and scaling of revenue-generating APIs.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
21
The API Analytics Cheat Sheet

Retention

While you spend so much time and effort in helping customers discover and engage with your products, the effort would be a waste if, for any reason, they were not loyal to the product and you were not able to retain them as customers for a prolonged period of time. Loyalty over time is a great measure of the overall success of your product, and that is why customer retention is a key product metric that all types of products must track.

The following diagram shows the retention metrics you will learn about in the following sections:

Figure 11.11 – Product metrics for retention

Figure 11.11 – Product metrics for retention

In the case of APIs, the engagement is purely based on regular usage. If your customers have successfully integrated with your APIs, their usage patterns should reflect this integration. You can measure the usage patterns in a few different ways that allow you to evaluate how customers are using the APIs over a prolonged period of time, and this will help you...