Inconclusive Sunday evening

Cris Pintea

Cris Pintea

What better way to start your Sunday evening than by thinking a bit about your Saas? I’m talking about Uptimeline of course! I mean, watching Dr. House is fun and all, but thinking about the SaaS is way more exciting! It’s just hard to start, for some reason I often procrastinate starting. Once I start, 5 minutes in, it’s usually then really easy to keep going, and the more I do and think the more I get excited and wanna continue doing and thinking.

Well, I’m sure the glass of wine I just poured myself will make it even more exciting!

Soo, it’s been only 3 days since my last iteration on Uptimeline’s new landing page, out of which 2 are not working days, so there’s probably not a lot to see, but I’m gonna start by analysing a bit what’s been happening these last few days, see if I get any ideas that’d be worth executing right now.

Analysing the new trialing user

1 new trial was started in these 3 days, by someone who already had an account on Uptimeline, created 4 months ago, yet they still came in through the new landing page (which is only reachable through Google Ads). Aaaaand they have only glitch.com websites monitored. Glitch is a sort of free hosting service. Usually glitch.com users are students who are learning and have no budget for monitoring applications. The peculiarity of glitch.com websites is they get hybernated if no one opens them for a few minutes. That’s why some people put uptime monitors on their glitches, to keep them always awake. So I’ve always counted those users as not relevant to the business. Yet this one signed up for a free trial to a service that’s clearly paid, and put their credit card in. Of course, nowadays that has little value since anyone can create a temporary card with services like Revolut. Nevertheless, why would you chose a solution that will only work for 30 days (duration of free trial)? This is confusing. TODO: Maybe I should call this user and ask them why they signed up. In case I’m wrong and there is actual business potential behind these customers.

Analysing the new leads

The changes I’ve made in the last iteration try to improve these things:

  • conversion rate to trial
  • conversion to trial after bouncing off the flow (through email campaign)

So we should only check these. I don’t have enough data truth be told to talk about conversion rate to trial. It is very tempting to imagine that there was an improvement since I’ve gotten a new free trial out of only 16 leads, which last time it took 50 leads to get to, but that would be totally irrational. This would be likely to happen even if no improvement was made. So I can’t be sure yet about that. And actually, I will never have enough data to draw a statistical conclusion here. Also this is the last step of the funnel, and I realise now that it’s not what I should have worked on last week. I should focus on the first steps of the funnel first, like why out of the 250 targeted clicks only 50 completed the flow? It’ll be easier to work on the last steps of the funnel if I optimise the first ones and increase traffic to the last ones to begin with. TODO: look at last week’s analysis, what actions will improve the beginning of the flow, if any? Any more ideas about that? For example setting up Google Ads conversion tracking on this flow might improve the quality of the incoming traffic, which is an improvement at the beginning of the funnel.

Found a bug?

I noticed that various of the leads are repeated multiple times. I just checked and the ones that are duplicated seem to be coming from the old landing page flow. (which is still the root of the uptimeline.com domain). Perhaps they came through the dynamic ads campain (which usually only brings in marginal amounts of traffic), or uptimeline was mentioned somewhere on some blog or social media site and that brought a spike in organic search traffic.

Which makes me think that TODO: it’d be useful to be able to differentiate these leads based on which flow they came from, with certainty.

Conclusions

DONE: I could increase the spending on Ads to increase the rate at which I’m acquiring data now that I need it, and then turn ads off when I am being the bottleneck.

I gotta get working on client work, I’ll get back to uptimeline soon.

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