SaaS Metrics Dashboards

The Purpose of Metrics Dashboards

Dashboards are not decorations. They exist to inform decisions and drive action. Every element on a dashboard should answer a question someone is asking or highlight a problem that needs attention.

Many companies build dashboards that look impressive but provide little value. Vanity metrics, overwhelming complexity, and lack of actionable insights plague most SaaS dashboards. The goal is to build something useful, not something pretty.

Core SaaS Metrics to Track

Revenue Metrics

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is the foundational SaaS metric. Track total MRR along with its components: new MRR from new customers, expansion MRR from upgrades, and lost MRR from churned and downgraded customers.

Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) provides the yearly view, useful for forecasting and investor communication. For most operational decisions, MRR is more actionable because it shows trends faster.

Customer Metrics

Total customers matters less than customer quality. Track customers by segment, plan type, and acquisition cohort. Understanding who your customers are provides context for all other metrics.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) measures efficiency. Combine CAC with Lifetime Value (LTV) to understand unit economics. A healthy SaaS business typically has LTV at least 3x CAC.

Retention Metrics

Customer churn rate measures the percentage of customers who leave in a period. Revenue churn is often more important because losing one enterprise customer hurts more than losing ten small customers.

Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is the gold standard metric for SaaS health. It measures how much revenue you retain from existing customers including expansion. NRR above 100% means you grow even without new customers.

Engagement Metrics

Engagement predicts retention. Track daily and monthly active users (DAU/MAU), feature adoption rates, and usage patterns. Declining engagement often precedes churn by weeks or months.

Dashboard Design Principles

Hierarchy of Information

Not all metrics are equally important. Design dashboards with clear hierarchy: the most critical metrics should be prominent and easy to find. Secondary metrics support and explain the primary ones.

Executive dashboards should show 5-7 key metrics. Detailed dashboards for specific teams can show more, but even those should prioritize ruthlessly.

Context Over Numbers

A number without context is meaningless. Is 5% churn good or bad? Is 10,000 active users growth or decline? Always show metrics with relevant context: trends over time, comparison to goals, and benchmarks.

Actionable Insights

Every metric should connect to potential actions. If a metric goes up or down, what should someone do about it? Design dashboards that answer this question implicitly or explicitly.

Real-Time vs. Accurate

Real-time data is exciting but often premature. Daily fluctuations in metrics can cause anxiety without providing useful signal. Consider whether weekly or monthly views provide more actionable insights for each metric.

Dashboard Tools for SaaS

ChartMogul

Purpose-built for SaaS metrics. ChartMogul connects to billing systems and automatically calculates MRR, churn, LTV, and other subscription metrics. Excellent for companies focused primarily on revenue metrics.

Baremetrics

Another SaaS-focused analytics platform with strong Stripe integration. Baremetrics provides benchmarking against other SaaS companies, which adds valuable context to your metrics.

Mixpanel and Amplitude

Product analytics platforms that excel at engagement and behavior metrics. If you need to understand what users do in your product, these tools provide deep insights.

Metabase and Looker

Business intelligence tools for custom dashboards. These platforms connect to your databases and allow flexible query building. More powerful but require more setup and maintenance.

Connecting Metrics to Action

Dashboards inform, but action drives results. The bridge between seeing a problem and solving it often involves communication with affected users. Sequenzy connects your metrics to automated action.

When dashboards reveal issues, Sequenzy can trigger appropriate responses:

• Engagement dropping? Trigger re-engagement sequences automatically.
• Churn spiking? Send retention-focused communication to at-risk users.
• Expansion opportunities identified? Warm those accounts with relevant content.
• Activation lagging? Accelerate onboarding with targeted emails.

This closed loop turns passive observation into active improvement. Metrics alone do not improve outcomes; action does.

Building Your Metrics Stack

Start with the Source

Your billing system is the source of truth for revenue metrics. Ensure it is properly configured and integrated with your dashboard tools. Garbage in, garbage out; clean billing data is essential.

Identify Your Audience

Different teams need different dashboards. Executives want high-level business health. Product teams need engagement and feature metrics. Sales needs pipeline and conversion data. Build for specific audiences.

Define Success Upfront

Before building dashboards, define what good looks like. Set targets for key metrics so dashboards can show progress against goals. Without targets, metrics lack context.

Iterate Based on Usage

Track which dashboards people actually use. If nobody looks at a dashboard, either it is not useful or the right people do not know about it. Unused dashboards waste maintenance effort.

Common Dashboard Mistakes

Too Many Metrics

Dashboards crammed with every possible metric overwhelm rather than inform. Ruthlessly prioritize. If a metric does not drive decisions, remove it.

Vanity Metrics

Metrics that always go up (total users, cumulative revenue) feel good but hide problems. Focus on rate-based metrics that can go up or down based on performance.

No Drill-Down

High-level metrics prompt questions. When churn increases, you need to know why. Dashboards should allow drilling into underlying data to investigate problems.

Stale Data

Dashboards showing yesterday's data may be useless for real-time decisions. Understand the refresh rate of your dashboards and communicate it clearly.