The number of app installs of SlideMagic 2.0 is still small, but the graph has a similar shape as the exponential graphs we all have gotten used to over the past weeks.

Modern analytics tools allow you to track literally everything under the sun in your app and/or web site. Instant information overload supported by colourful graphs that look good, but don’t say much. This overload of data is similar to the ones I would encounter as a consultant at McKinsey. And now, 15+ years later, I find myself following a similar approach to making sense of it for my own app.

Most case examples about analytics are built for established apps and web sites with huge customer flows you can micro analyse whether the check out button should br green or red. SlideMagic is not there yet.

• I find myself going through a certain cycle. It starts with a basic question, “how many people did actually install the app”, which results in a daily manual routine to find the latest number, which then gets translated into a proper query in an analytics app. I check whether my analytics tool is consistent with the numbers I can dig out of my own server. Slowly, slowly, I get a sense of how the app behaves with a consistent set of data that I can recognise.

• Slowly, slowly, I start adding more questions to the picture, and make sure that I keep a picture of how they relate.

• Each factor has a specific visualisation: some are lines, some are bars, some uniques, some totals, some cumulative, you need to play around with it.

The key factor I need to work on now is a very specific one. Of the users that know of SlideMagic, installed it, tried it a first time, then tried it out seriously (now we are down to small numbers), of those, can I get a handful of users that really, really start using it. If we get that final step to work, I am confident that the previous steps in the funnel will work itself out.

Work in progress.

Photo by YIFEI CHEN on Unsplash