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

Activation

Activation metrics attempt to measure how many users have started to use your product and find value. The first challenge of defining an activation metric is how you define a user as being active. This usually varies from business to business. For example, if you are looking at a business in the payments domain, you can expect that an active user will have a certain number of weekly transactions. Similarly, if you look at the communications domain, a user sending a minimum of a certain number of messages a day might be considered active. Any users who are actively using the product can be considered active users.

The following diagram shows a few of the key activation metrics you will learn about in this section:

Figure 11.8 – Product metrics to measure activation

Figure 11.8 – Product metrics to measure activation

The following subsections will dive deeper into the individual metrics – time to first transaction (TFT), time to value (TTV), cohort analysis, and daily, weekly,...