How does your product analytics strategy stack up? 💡Take the Quiz (opens in a new tab) to understand where you stand and get tips to advance.

The RAE Framework

For customers new to product analytics, we'd like to recommend a simple RAE framework to hone in on your 2-3 key metrics / KPIs. RAE stands for (R)each, (A)ctivation, and (E)ngagement. Using this framework, you can quickly identify the key events and properties you need to start measuring your KPIs. This framework also translates into a clearly defined funnel or sequence of events that monitors your product's reach, to enabling user activation, and finally tracking the level of your users' engagement.

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If you're further along in your analytics journey, you can progress to using Mixpanel's Focus Metric Framework which provides a more granular approach to tracking success metrics.

Measure your Product's Value

Your product's metrics and KPIs should be defined around your product's value to your target users. The more value your users derive from your product, the higher their adoption and engagement which leads to higher retention.


In order to measure your product's value (i.e. what is the problem that your solution is trying to solve), you need to:

  1. Identify the key actions that indicate a user is getting value out of your product
  2. Match these key actions to their expected natural frequency (daily / weekly / monthly) at solving your user’s problem

These key actions + natural frequency is what we call Value Moments. The more value moments means more opportunities for users to build a habit (i.e. product stickiness) around your product and remain long term customers. Using value moments as metrics helps you set tangible goals and measure what really matters.

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For more details on Measuring Value read Chapter 1 of The Guide to Product Analytics (opens in a new tab) and how it impacts product Growth (opens in a new tab).

Retain your Product’s Reach

Reach is defined as the total number of users who have used your product in a recent time period.


Reach is important because it represents the maximum amount of users who could reasonably become active and engaged, whether organically or through re-engagement campaigns. The goal is to focus on retaining your Reach, and in order to do that, you need to track:

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The goal is to ensure that a majority of your Reach are active users who are continuously finding value from your product.

Activate your Users

User Activation is not simply about a user creating their account or signing-up to your product. It is the process of taking a user from sign-up to establishing a habit around your product’s core value proposition. The user’s first impression of your product will influence their every following step, including further engagement and upgrades, so it is essential to understand and optimize for this journey.


Activation can be viewed as a 3 step funnel where users go through setting up, to understanding the value of your product, and then experiencing more of that value to want to continue using it.

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💡 Products with really long activation periods will need to be broken down further into even smaller pieces. For example, signing up for a home loan has an extremely long activation period and funnel.

Increase User Engagement

Engagement measures the depth of user activity in discovering or experiencing more value moments from your product. Highly engaged users are more likely to contribute to stronger product growth, as they not only contribute to more "value exchange", but are also more likely to recommend your product.

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To measure the level of engagement, an example is to segment your users into Casual, Core, and Power users against your engagement strategy.


There are four general classifications of engagement strategies which can be combined depending on your product or business goals:

The end goal of segmenting your users into different engagement cohorts is to move users from a less engaged to a more engaged state (ie Casual -> Core).

For more details on defining and viewing your user cohorts, read our Guide to Product Analytics (opens in a new tab).

Crafting your Metrics and KPIs

Regardless of the Analytics Framework you adopt, it's important to craft your metrics and KPIs based on your business' goals, ensuring they are not only result-oriented, but also actionable. Leverage the following key pointers as you define your metrics and KPIs:

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Having the right metrics enables you to develop the key insights necessary to make better decisions for your product. Here are some metrics that you might want to avoid and tips on how you can transform them into more impactful metrics instead.

Summary

As your product evolves so should your metrics and KPIs. Depending on your key value moment's natural frequency, business objectives, and product maturity, you should be reviewing your metrics periodically (eg: every 3, 6, or 12 months) to see if they are still relevant in driving product and business growth.

To sum up everything you've learned, below is an example of the RAE Framework (click to zoom). You can also access a copy of a blank RAE Framework Template from here (opens in a new tab). Save a copy to your device to get started on defining your metrics and KPIs.

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💡 Start thinking about Retention (opens in a new tab) once you have fine-tuned your RAE Framework.

Additional Resources

SetupTracking Strategy

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