navy logo
Products
PRODUCTS
survey icon
In-Product Surveys
Capture targeted user insights right in your product
replays icon
Replays
Recreate and optimize user journeys across your product
teal icon of a survey with chapters
Long-Form Surveys
Measure UX at scale with advanced link surveys and AI analysis.
heatmaps icon
Heatmaps
Visualize user behavior in your product at scale
feedback icon
Feedback
Collect continuous user feedback at scale
ai recommendations icon
AI Insights
NEW
Sprig AI generates actionable product solutions
Features
integrations
Integrations
mobile icon
Mobile
star icon
AI Analysis
magic pencil icon
AI Study Creator
dashboards icon
Dashboards
Solutions
by Use Case
continuously optimize icon
Continuously optimize
Analyze your users’ experience through core flows
solve pain points icon
Solve pain points
Uncover emerging trends in your users’ behavior
improve conversion icon
Improve conversion
Understand why and how users are dropping off
save time and resources icon
Save time & resources
Know which new features are worth the investment
by TEAM
uxr icon
User Research
Maximize the speed and impact of your research
Design
Validate and get buy-in for designs with real user insights
pm icon
Product Management
marketing
Marketing
code icon
Engineering
star icon
Customer Experience
Templates
lenny template
Survey
Develop Product Sense to Build Great Products
lenny headshot
Lenny Rachitsky
View Template
arrow icon
feedback template
Feedback
Continuously Collect Product Feedback
favicon
Sprig
View Template
arrow icon
Optimize New Features
Replay
Optimize New Features to Enhance the User Experience
favicon
Sprig
View Template
arrow icon
templates
Template Gallery
Discover how our team and community use Sprig templates to inform product development.
View All
arrow icon
Customers
square nav photosquare left logo
Square uncovered 100+ actionable insights within the first 6 months
Read Now
arrow icon
ramp nav imageramp logo
Ramp created customer-centric products with Sprig AI
Read Now
arrow icon
classpass nav photoclasspass left logo
ClassPass improved usability and retention by optimizing core user journeys
Read Now
arrow icon
users icon
Meet our Customers
Learn how top companies leverage Sprig user insights to boost conversion, reduce churn, improve onboarding, and more.
View All
arrow icon
Resources
blog icon
Blog
Get expert advice on capturing product experience insights
event icon
Events & Webinars
Learn from past Sprig events & register for upcoming ones
help center icon
Help Center
Explore our knowledge hub to get started
in Sprig
video tutorial icon
Video Tutorials
Get a crash course in Sprig with our guided
video series
AI replay announcement text with a dashboard showing AI insights
New: AI-Powered Always-On Replays
Read Now
arrow icon
EnterprisePricing
Sign In
Book a Demo
navy logo
hamburger menu iconclose icon
Products
caret icon
Products
survey icon
In-Product Surveys
teal icon of a survey with chapters
Long-Form Surveys
feedback icon
Feedback
replays icon
Replays
heatmaps icon
Heatmaps
ai recommendations icon
AI Insights
Features
integrations
Integrations
mobile icon
Mobile
star icon
AI Analysis
magic pencil icon
AI Study Creator
dashboards icon
Dashboards
Solutions
caret icon
By Use case
continuously optimize icon
Continuously optimize your product & website
solve pain points icon
Surface & solve pain points
improve conversion icon
Improve conversion rates
save time and resources icon
Save engineering time & resources
By TEAM
uxr icon
User Research
Design
pm icon
Product Management
marketing
Marketing
code icon
Engineering
star icon
Customer Experience
Templates
Customers
Resources
caret icon
blog icon
Blog
event icon
Events & Webinars
help center icon
Help Center
video tutorial icon
Video Tutorials
Enterprise
Pricing
Sign InGet Started Free
Blogarrow icon
User Insights
arrow icon
5 Non-Conversion Based Metrics You Should Track and Measure
User Insights

5 Non-Conversion Based Metrics You Should Track and Measure

Written by Allison Dickin | Nov 23, 2020

November 23, 2020

5 Non-Conversion Based Metrics You Should Track and Measure

I’ve got one word for you:

HipChat.

Did you cringe? If you know your instant messaging app history well, then you probably did.

It was 2009 when HipChat was released, and right from the start, it seemed an instant success. Within the first four months, it managed to get 1,000 companies using the tool. It had many features that made it unique and more user-friendly for team chats.

All seemed well in the HipChat world until 2013 — the year Slack was released.

For a while there, HipChat still had more users, but by September 2014, Slack had conquered, and a search on the web will show you just how much.

HipChat is no more, crushed under the weight of Slack’s continuing success. They seemed like they’d be that unicorn, that diamond in the rough. But in the end, they didn’t keep up with what people wanted.

Slack offered what people wanted. A free version, deep integrations, and some psychological tactics that kept people returning to the app to make sure they were caught up.

What’s the lesson?

When measuring HipChat by conversion-based metrics, they seemed like an unstoppable Goliath. But much like the biblical giant, they met an untimely fate for underestimating the importance of listening well to their customer needs.

Measuring your products’ success can’t be solely founded on conversion-based metrics; they must focus on the customer too.

You and I both know that there are a lot of metrics worth tracking.

However, even when you think you’re creating the product your customers want, if you aren’t tracking the right metrics, you’re missing out on the full picture of user insights, which could point you in the wrong direction.

Customer-Centricity: It’s Harder Than You Think

Did you know the idea of customer-centricity started to gain some traction during the ’60s?

Even back in the “good ol’ days,” corporations recognized the need to create products that solve real problems and meet the needs of paying customers.

And now here we are sixty years later in a world vastly different from the 1960s, and we’ve learned two things about customer-centricity:

  1. It’s even more important now than it was before.
  2. The pace of the market is so fast that it’s hard to stay aligned with customer needs — especially if you measure the wrong metrics.

Most businesses all like to say they’re customer-focused.

But they tend to create KPIs that lead them to fall into the pattern of measuring interactions and how they relate to business health.

Companies who do this end up calculating their products’ success based mostly on business results (signups, sales, etc.), which translates into being business-centric — not customer-focused.

It’s not all bad, though. There’s an obvious need to track metrics and KPIs that are business-based.

However, to get customer-centric, we must also consider adding what Harvard Business Institute calls Customer Performance Indicators (CPIs) to the mix. These CPIs track metrics that help your company focus on an outcome important to your customers.

And to do that well, there are a few very important non-conversion-based metrics worth tracking.

The most important metrics you need to track aren’t the ones you think

If you think of conversions to your product being like getting someone to agree to go out on a date with you, then non-conversion metrics would be like the body language that you’d pick up on during that date to tell you if it was going well or not.

While it’s exciting to get someone to go on that “date” (i.e., using your product), they could be having a terrible time using that product because you didn’t pick up on the digital body language hidden in different metrics.

So if you want to pick up on the cues your customers are putting out there so that they stick around or keep singing up, you need to expand your views a bit.

Below we’ve outlined five metrics that you should definitely consider tracking to help you understand how your customers are using your products.

1. User-Activity

This metric is best for digital products or apps and is generally measured within three temporal windows:

  • Daily Active Users (DAU).
  • Weekly Active Users (WAU).
  • Monthly Active Users (MAU).

Even if your product doesn’t have daily users, tracking how many use it weekly or monthly gives you a clearer view of the habit, needs, and/or usefulness the product has.

Studying this metric helps identify brackets of your most active users, which gives insights into your various demographics you could focus on for better growth.

When calculating user activity, it’s crucial to determine what your team defines as an “active” user. Is it when they login to your product? Is it when they click on a specific attribute or open a particular page?

Once your team has defined what an active user is for your specific product, you can find how many daily, weekly, or monthly users you have.

To better understand how your product is doing in your customers’ eyes, you could try this micro-survey template to figure out if you need to improve on meeting your customer needs.

2. Week #1 Engagement

The first week that someone signs up to use your product should be full of activity and regular use. If users are not actively engaging in the app during this timeline, then they’re most likely going to drop off into the ether of an inactive user.

If you’re getting a consistent amount of signups but low week one engagement, then your users are trying to tell you something isn’t working for them.

Getting to the bottom of just what that is takes some noodling:

  • Is the onboarding process too hard?
  • Is the product not living up to the claims made by marketing?
  • Is the UI not intuitive enough?

To get answers to these questions, you need to understand what their expectations are versus their experience.

Tracking this metric could unveil innumerable insights, allowing you to improve the experience and keep users engaged and happy.

3. Time In-App

The number of times someone logs into your app probably seems like a good indicator of a happy and habitual user.

But how long do they stick around?

Tracking the time spent in-app helps you understand more about the value your app is giving your users. If they’re in the app for only a few minutes, when you know they need to spend at least 12-15 minutes, it means something needs your attention.

This action could also indicate that users have found another way of using your product in a useful way, but you weren’t aware of it yet.

4. Feature Usage

This metric is full of valuable customer insights you don’t want to lose.

Most products have various customer profiles they appeal too, with features designed to help all of them. However, some features will be used more by some than by others.

For example, ActiveCampaign is an email marketing tool with many features and attracts users of all business types and sizes.

The CRM feature isn’t the most popular one, but it’s frequently used by those with a dedicated sales team who are likely willing to pay more.

Tracking this metric for your product could reveal similar patterns and opportunities for other pricing tiers. It also tells you the most about who is using what feature.

And piece this data together with something like Time In-App could offer you insights on who your best customers are and if it’s worth spending more of your marketing team's efforts.

To help you gather your user’s thoughts around various features you’ve put out, we have this Gauge Feature Satisfaction template you can use in your app.

5. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

I know…

CAC is more of a marketing metric rather than a product-related one, but it plays a part in what you’re doing too.

There’s a lot of money and moving parts that go into getting someone into your product. Everything from sales and marketing overlaps in more ways than one with what you’re doing.

For instance, the sales teams may find customers in a specific vertical take longer to convert into a user. Still, your data on their activity shows those specific customers are your most active users with the lowest churn.

Acquiring this customer may cost more upfront but generates more revenue annually than others. Boom — there’s your perfect customer/product fit!

Digging into marketing metrics like this one helps you understand what’s bringing people to the product. Your insights from other metrics show how well that’s paying off.

Keep an eye on this. It’s worth it — quite literally.

You may not have direct control over lowering CAC, but you can always take advantage of improving your product as new people come into your app. Try to gauge how users feel about the onboarding experience using this prebuilt template.

Not All Metrics Are Equal

Conversion-based product metrics have a significant role in the success of your product. But, as we’ve seen here, they’re not the only metric you should be tracking.

Metrics like the ones listed above help lend to the subtle nuances — a sort of digital body language — that help you understand the experiences of those onboarding and using your products.

All businesses are in the business of relationships.

And when you make a move to track other metrics like the ones listed here, you’ll be better equipped to build products that customers desire while keeping them coming back for more.

Need some help figuring out the right metrics for your customers? Contact Sprig for a complimentary working session with a product survey expert.

Sign up for our newsletter

Get the best content on user insights, design, and product management delivered to your inbox every week.

linkedin icontwitter icon

Written by

Allison Dickin

Survey fanatic and customer experience advocate. Former Research Director at Yale School of Management and Senior Research Manager at Etsy. Bucknell and University of Chicago alum.

Related Articles

Top Product Survey Questions for 2025
User Insights
Dec 19, 2024

Top Product Survey Questions for 2025

NPS Survey Best Practices: Maximize Insight and Drive Improvement
User Insights
May 10, 2024

NPS Survey Best Practices: Maximize Insight and Drive Improvement

Optimizing Your Survey Data: When to Use Open-Ended or Close-Ended Questions
User Insights
Apr 24, 2024

Optimizing Your Survey Data: When to Use Open-Ended or Close-Ended Questions

white sprig logo
Products
In-Product Surveys
Long-Form Surveys
Feedback
Replays
Heatmaps
AI Insights
Features
Integrations
Mobile
AI Study Creator
Dashboards
AI Analysis
Security Standards
Solutions
BY use case
Continuously Optimize
Improve Conversion
Solve Pain Points
Save Time & Resources
BY TEAM
User Research
Design
Product Management
Marketing
Engineering
Customer Experience
Templates
Customers
Resources
Blog
Events & Webinars
Help Center
Video Tutorials
Session Replay Guide
Pricing
Enterprise
Company
About Us
Careers
Sprig Service Agreement
Privacy Policy
Data Processing Addendum
Status
Compare
vs Qualtrics
vs Fullstory
vs Hotjar
vs Medallia
vs Pendo
Copyright 2025 Sprig, All Rights Reserved
linedkin logotwitter logo