How to Measure Product Launch Success

Pulling off a successful product launch is no easy feat. During the planning and lead up there are lots of things to pay attention to and keep track of, whether it’s scheduling, meeting sprint goals or ticking off items on your sales and marketing launch checklists. Once your product is out the door and released into the world, it's time to measure your product launch's effectiveness; you and your management team will start asking much different questions and priorities will shift from “how many days will we slip?” to “what’s our adoption looking like?” That's where product launch KPIs come into play.

Today we'll look at how to determine the best KPIs for your product launch. "While running toward a final goal is great, knowing if you are on the right path along the way is just as important," Chris Ayala, CEO of smartphone breathalyzer tool Alcohoot, tells Business News Daily, "It also means that everyone understands there is accountability — either for success or failure. Without measurements, then after-the-fact analysis is almost impossible." Before you start measuring arbitrary items and throwing numbers around, it’s critical that everyone involved cares about the same key metrics.

This is why your key metric definition process should take place before you even launch, this means not only setting and agreeing to a specific set of goals, but also determining how you will measure your progress toward them.

“Reporting on the results of your product launch should be a natural outcome of establishing launch goals,” explains Dave Daniels of Launch Clinic on the Pragmatic Marketing Blog, “Define metrics that support the goals and then a meaningful Launch Status Report can be developed.” In theory, these goals should be relatively obvious, as they would align with the same reasons you created a new product or released a new version of an existing one.

You saw a market opportunity with a set of potential customers that are looking to solve a problem or satisfy a need. Your next step is translating those goals into actual usage behavior:“No matter what your site is, there are actions you're hoping visitors will take - from tweeting a link to your post to leaving a comment to buying a product or subscribing to an email list. Whatever those actions might be, you need to record the visits that make them through your analytics tool,” says Rand Fishkin, cofounder of Moz in an article on website launches, “Once action tracking is in place, you can segment traffic sources and visit paths by the actions that were taken and learn more about what predicts a visitor is going to be valuable.”

Start by Measuring Marketing’s Launch Efforts

Your product’s launch success is just as much about attracting users to try the product as it is about the product itself, which means measuring performance of your marketing efforts is a good starting point.

‍After you launch, “be vigilant about keeping track of what efforts are starting to lose effectiveness so that you can make the appropriate changes,” says Martin Lünendon, founder of Entrepreneurial Insights “In the same manner, keeping track of which media tools were the most successful in converting potential customers into sales will give an indicator of where your efforts should be spent. Dropping the ineffectual methods and replacing them with renewed efforts in the productive methods will help not only generate income by identifying new customers; it will maximize the customer awareness.” One of the easiest ways to track marketing channel and tactic effectiveness is through liberal usage of landing pages.

“When driving traffic to our website, instead of pointing a link to our main site, we use one of our landing pages based on what we know about that visitor,” Sami Linnanvuo, CEO of Screenful explains a tactic that works to measure results both during and after a launch, “We can compare the effectiveness of different channels on different visitor segments. We’re curious to learn how these alternate landing pages convert and which are the best channels for each page.” Setting up a landing page for each channel or campaign makes it incredibly simple to see where traffic is coming from, and if you are able to flag those users for future cohort analyses, you’ll be able to see the long-term quality of those visitors as well and track their progress through the sales funnel.