Many entrepreneurs and business startups, especially when it is a first draft, tend to value your project with sensations, omens and surface data. With this you can pass “to tiptoe” for the first talks of the startup itself. But when there is already presentation to investors, mentors or collaborators potential experts the most important objection is almost always the same: “I am not teaching the important metrics of your startup”.

If there are no numbers validated for some business activity, the startup will hardly find a financial or mentoring support.

Examples of important metrics for your startup:

• CPA for a particular channel: Acquisition cost for google adwords for example.
• “Customer lifetime value”: The economic value of a customer to a company throughout its “life” as a client.

“Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable”

Called “vanity metrics” are those metrics or measurements that are simple to calculate and communicate but they really do not give crucial information about the real state of a startup in a particular market. Sometimes do not give clues, the reason I mention that is because as they are the most visible, many entrepreneurs give importance incorrectly. A couple of clear examples would be the number of fans on a fanpage, twitter followers or number of visits on a website.

Instead, actionable metrics are those that mediate calculation can be carried out an improvement action in a particular project. A practical example could be the bounce rate. If we see that an important web page has a high bounce rate will mean that you need to improve on its contents or the user does not understand the content of it or just was not what you expected.

Finding the metrics for startup actionable

Find these metrics, often can mean the success or failure of a startup. It sounds somewhat dramatic but if these measurements or performance indices are found not know how to separate “the wheat from the chaff”.

Here are some tips to find these metrics “long-awaited”

1. Split testing: Tests A / B experiments are necessary at all stages of a startup. These tests allow ratify or discard hypotheses. Breakthroughs are achieved when the “split-testing” is integrated in most processes of a startup. I will focus on marketing: two types of texts or images in an ad two CTA ( “call to action”) other than on a product page, split testing methodologies to capture leads (earmark for example same budget facebook ads and google adwords).
2. Use “useful segments”: I explain with an example. If we analyze page views a webpage if we stay with that number only we scratch the surface, however, if we divide this number by country, new visits / recurring and device (mobile, computer or tablet) obtain information much more deep to find these important metrics for your startup.
3. Create simple reports: Complicated reports are sometimes showy but of little use. In most cases a single sheet with funnel information shows us much more clearly.

You consider the actionable metric interesting? You can share any you find interesting?