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

Usage metrics

You will hear the term usage repeatedly when it comes to metrics. This is because there are various dimensions of usage metrics. In terms of infrastructure, you are measuring the usage of the resources of your API infrastructure. When we talk about usage as part of product metrics in Chapter 11, we will dive into the consumer experience and usage in terms of the product.

In the following screenshot, you can see the seven key infrastructure metrics that you must track across all your APIs:

Figure 10.5 – Key API infrastructure usage metrics

In the following sections, you will learn in-depth about these seven key infrastructure usage metrics.

Requests Per Minute (RPM)

The RPM metric is a standard metric for gauging the application manager’s performance. Since the server doesn’t account for the latency caused by input and output (I/O) processes, it acts as a ceiling for an application’s interface.

RPM is commonly...