Take the Guesswork Out

of Product Development
Building Better Applications with Software Analytics
As a product manager or software developer, you have
ambitious plans for making your software application successful
for your customers and for your business. But turning those plans into
reality is easier said than done, especially when you lack critical
insight into product runtime and customer usage patterns and their
computing environments.

Your strategic product decisions have far-reaching effects that ripple

throughout the customer journey. These decisions should be based on fact
— not just anecdotal evidence or gut feelings. However, if you’re like most
software developers, you might not have the tools required to make informed
decisions based on how customers are actually using your product. Given
that 45% of product managers spend the majority of their day deciding what
should go into products1, this lack of insight could be standing in the way of
successfully meeting customer needs.

Product managers spend the majority of their

day deciding what should go into products.
The lack of insight could be standing in the way
of successfully meeting customer needs.

1. P
 ragmatic Marketing, 2014 State of Product Management
and Marketing Survey, at 7.

2 Building Better Applications with Software Analytics

Drowning in Data but Still Lacking Insight?
Chances are you and your product management teams are spending long
hours collecting data from multiple, disparate sources and trying to sift
through and organize this data to learn about customers and how they
interact with your product. You might be relying on some combination of:

• Download logs and call-home statistics

• Feedback from the sales channel and customer support staff
• Data from customer relationship management (CRM)
systems and marketing automation frameworks
• Web analytics reports
• Ad-hoc surveys with customers or prospects

But trying to make sense of all this data is painful, time-consuming, and
too often, inconclusive — forcing you to base product decisions on
guesswork rather than fact-based analysis. It’s no wonder 28% of product
teams are kept up at night worrying that delivered features aren’t being
used by customers2.

According to a Pragmatic Marketing

survey, product teams are kept up at
night worrying that delivered features
aren’t being used by customers.

2. P
 ragmatic Marketing, 2014 State of Product Management
and Marketing Survey, at 5.

Building Better Applications with Software Analytics 3

Gain Actionable Intelligence with Software Analytics
When you’re trying to keep up with pressing customer demands and rapidly
changing markets, it’s risky to rely on anecdotal evidence, disjointed data,
or non-actionable vanity metrics like download statistics for making key
product decisions. Software usage analytics provide valuable business
intelligence that helps guide your decisions and focus your efforts where
they’ll have the most impact.

Software analytics and runtime intelligence tools help you build better
applications by providing comprehensive, targeted reports that show where,
when, and how your applications are being used by trial users and paying
customers around the globe. Armed with these actionable insights, you can Software usage analytics help
make data-driven decisions about your product roadmap, allocate engineering answer critical questions such as:
resources more effectively, and develop more informed sales and marketing
strategies that drive competitive advantage and increased revenue. • How often do users engage with your application?

• When does it make sense to pull the plug on

With software analytics, you get the benefits of a continuous, automated
a legacy version?
feedback loop, which helps you stay on the right track and avoid wasting
time, money and resources on building, marketing, and supporting • Which features are your customers using and not using?
features that aren’t widely used and valued by customers. These tools also
• What software versions, OS platforms, and
enable you to identify usage patterns and trends, so you know which user
hardware architectures are customers using?
experience (UX) or user interface (UI) design improvements are most likely to
increase conversion and adoption rates. • For how long and in what way are prospects evaluating
your product?

• Are there underlying usage trends or behavior patterns

related to user churn?

• How would dropping an old feature affect your

customer base?

• What’s the optimal pricing structure for your product?

4 Building Better Applications with Software Analytics

 Select the Right Software Analytics Tool for the Job
We live in a big data world, but not all software analytics tools are created
equal. Once you’ve identified the core actionable metrics you want to track,
you need a solution that enables you to collect and visualize your product
data clearly and seamlessly to guide smart decision making.

When evaluating software analytics tools

to support data-driven product engagement decisions, look for a solution that:
• Collects meaningful data that deliver actionable metrics such as those • Provides out-of-the-box reporting to help you quickly understand
related to user engagement, feature usage, and purchases versus and answer both basic and complex questions for rapid return on
simplistic drop-off or uninstall numbers investment (ROI)

• Goes beyond data collection and delivers real insights in a highly • Allows you to easily customize dashboards and reports to meet
graphical format that’s easy to access and digest your company-specific requirements

• Converts raw data into actionable business intelligence reports with • Integrates seamlessly with third-party business intelligence
drill-down and segmentation capabilities and CRM tools

• Displays real-time visualizations that present high-level information • Adapts and scales to meet your evolving business requirements
with the ability to drill down interactively when you need to learn more

Building Better Applications with Software Analytics 5

REAL-WORLD RESULTS:
Software Analytics in Action
Here are some examples of how product managers have used
software analytics to solve specific business problems and make
data-driven product decisions that yielded measurable results.

How do I know when it’s okay to drop support

for an old software version?
A developer productivity software firm wanted to figure out if it made good
business sense to stop supporting a legacy version of its flagship product.
Although significant engineering resources were required to support the
old version, the sales team was concerned that its discontinuation might
adversely affect a substantial number of customers.

Using software usage analytics, the product management team was able
to see which customers — and how many users — were still running the
legacy version and how actively they were engaging with it. It turned out
only a small group of users were impacted, so the company decided to offer
them an attractive discount to upgrade to the current version. The highly
targeted upgrade offer was well received, enabling the firm to drop support
for the old version and reallocate quality assurance and customer support
resources — without causing disgruntled customers.

Using software usage analytics, the product management

team was able to see which customers — and how many
users — were still running the legacy version and how
actively they were engaging with it.

6 Building Better Applications with Software Analytics

REAL-WORLD RESULTS: Software Analytics in Action

Should I dump an old feature that’s complicating

UI changes?
An old application feature written in legacy code was creating big problems
for the engineering team at a practice management software company.
5.5

4.5
Whenever the engineers made a change to the UI, the feature would
3.5

2.5
inevitably break — eating up additional time and resources. Despite this
extra cost and effort, the engineering team was reluctant to drop the feature
1.5

altogether for fear of alienating existing customers.

To determine the best resolution, product management used event tracking

to identify the unique number of users who actively engaged with the feature
on a frequent basis. Reports revealed only a small number of active users,
suggesting that elimination of the feature would not have major revenue
impact. As a result of these findings, the company decided to develop a new
feature that would better meet customers’ actual usage requirements while
operating seamlessly with newer versions of the software.

By using event tracking to identify the unique number of

users who actively engage with a feature written in legacy
code, reports revealed only a small number of active users,
suggesting that elimination of the feature would not have
major impact on existing customers.

Building Better Applications with Software Analytics 7

 REAL-WORLD RESULTS: Software Analytics in Action

Why aren’t trial users taking advantage

of our ‘killer’ feature?
Internal beliefs about a feature and its user benefits don’t always match
the real customer experience. That’s why an accounting software company
used software analytics to track all its major product features and how they
were being used by customers. Event tracking uncovered interesting trends,
including the fact that the “killer” rolling budgets feature — developed at a
significant cost to the company — was not being used by customers until a
month or more after product purchase.

To figure out the best way to promote the usage of this feature during
evaluations, the engineering team ran an A/B test by deploying two separate
builds of the software — each of which provided a different visible method to
access and use this rolling budgets capability. Product management tracked
and studied which version led more people to use the feature and adopted
that method within the UI of the next product release. As a result, adoption
of the rolling budgets feature increased dramatically among trial users, The engineering team ran an A/B test by deploying two
leading to a higher conversion rate. separate builds of the software — each of which provided
a different visible method to access and use the rolling
budgets capability.

8 Building Better Applications with Software Analytics

REAL-WORLD RESULTS: Software Analytics in Action

What impact will increasing minimum display

resolution requirements have on my customers?

20 When developing a new user interface for its photo editing application, a

19
graphics software company was trying to decide whether to increase its
minimum resolution requirements from 1024px to1920px. The UI team
believed the increase was critical to provide a better-looking UI that would
drive competitive advantage, but the engineers were concerned that there were
too many existing customers whose hardware did not meet this minimum

2 4 requirement, which would lead to dissatisfaction, or even worse, churn.

10 The product management team decided to settle the debate by backing

up gut feelings with actual facts. They used their software analytics tool
to run hardware architecture reports and determined that only a handful
of customers were still using resolutions below 1920px. Based on this
Using hardware architecture reports, the product management intelligence, the company made the strategic decision to increase its
team made the strategic decision to increase its minimum minimum display resolution requirements, thereby providing a better user
display resolution requirements, thereby providing a better experience for 95% of its customer base.
user experience for 95% of its customer base.

Building Better Applications with Software Analytics 9

 REAL-WORLD RESULTS: Software Analytics in Action

Why aren’t more of my trial users converting

to paying customers?
A PDF software company was baffled by how few trial users were converting
into paying customers — especially given all the innovative new features
included in its latest product version. Seeking data-driven answers, product
management ran a detailed conversion analysis study using its software
analytics tool to better understand user behavior in the critical days after
trial download.

The report revealed key usage patterns, showing that many trial users were
getting stuck in the configuration wizard and dumping the product within just
one hour of installing it. After making changes to improve usability of the
configuration wizard, the company significantly increased its conversion rate
as users spent more time engaging with the software and discovering its
capabilities during the trial period.

Analytics showed that more than1,000 users were lost within

the first 5 minutes of use. By improving the usability of the
configuration wizard, the company significantly increased its
trial conversion rate.

10 Building Better Applications with Software Analytics

REAL-WORLD RESULTS: Software Analytics in Action

How do I find out what existing customers think

about our new product feature?
An HR software company added a performance review workflow to its latest
5.5

4.5

3.5

product release and tracking showed that customers were actively using this
2.5

1.5

new feature. Given the initial success of the workflow, product management
decided to invest more into this feature in the next release. But in order to
prioritize what to do next, they wanted to augment the quantitative usage
data with qualitative feedback from their customers.

The product management team used in-application messaging to solicit

feedback directly from those customers who had accessed the new workflow
feature ten or more times a month since upgrading to the latest software
version. Using the company’s existing survey framework, they delivered
surveys to end–users in the form of an automated HTML pop-up window
directly within the HR application. Because the survey instantly appeared
when end-users logged into the application, the company achieved a high
response rate and collected valuable feedback for improving the workflow
feature in subsequent product releases.
The product management team used in-application messaging
to solicit feedback directly from those customers who had
accessed a new feature ten or more times a month since
upgrading to the latest version. The survey instantly appeared
when end-users logged into the application, and the company
achieved a high response rate and collected valuable feedback
for improving the feature in subsequent releases.

Building Better Applications with Software Analytics 11

Revulytics Usage Intelligence:
Better Software Begins with Better Data
Revulytics Usage Intelligence provides valuable insight into product runtime
and customer usage patterns to help you make data-driven decisions that
foster user engagement and accelerate adoption. This powerful solution
helps you understand user activity and conversions after your product is
downloaded by gathering intelligence on what platforms and architectures
the software is running, which products features are used or ignored, and
how usage and churn trends vary by user segment.
Give Software Usage Analytics a Try Today
Usage Intelligence does more than just collect data and map raw statistics — Risk Free!
onto colorful graphs. Our advanced analytics engine provides valuable
business intelligence via real-time interactive visualizations — with the Are you ready to take the guesswork out of
ability to drill-down into reports that answer specific product questions. product management decision making?
With actionable insights at your fingertips, you’re empowered to shape your
product strategy, roadmaps, packaging, and pricing models based on real- Visit https://www.revulytics.com/register to register for a
world facts about your software. Best of all, Usage Intelligence integrates free account and download the Usage Intelligence SDK with
into your application development process quickly and easily for rapid ROI. no commitment.

In as little as 30 minutes, you’ll be able to start tracking

installations, user activity, feature usage metrics and conversion/
churn trends; sending in-app messages; and collecting user
feedback to support data-driven product decisions.

12 Building Better Applications with Software Analytics