Is your business on the rise? Are there any obstacles to its growth? What aspects require improvements? SaaS KPI dashboard answers these questions in seconds and gives you an outlook on your business health and wealth. In fact, many modern SaaS dashboard examples show how companies use dashboards to monitor operations, track key performance indicators, and make faster strategic decisions.
In this article, we’ll break down what a SaaS metrics dashboard is, why it matters, the types of dashboards you can use, the key metrics to track, and more.
Stay tuned.
What is a SaaS metrics dashboard?
When it comes to measuring SaaS business growth, KPI and metrics are the main things you should look at. Traditional numeric records take much time, energy, and focus to analyze. A SaaS analytics dashboard is an effective tool that tracks, analyses, and displays metrics and KPIs in a visually understandable form, like charts, widgets, lists, and graphs. The biggest benefit of the dashboard is its simplicity and ability to transform raw data into meaningful insights.
Dashboard collects key metrics from sales, finance, customer support, and marketing, all in one place, so you can find problems and tackle them at the initial stages. We would even call it a launchpad for making strategic data-driven decision making.
Why do you need a SaaS dashboard?
Metrics are for doing, not for staring. Never measure just because you can. Measure to learn. Measure to fix.
Stijn Debrouwere
Based on the data you gain from a dashboard, teams can extract actionable insights and focus on priorities that help drive business growth. Instead of relying on fragmented reports, dashboards provide a centralized overview of SaaS metrics, helping leaders evaluate business performance and maintain the company’s financial health.
To be more specific, you can focus on goals and achieve them faster by fixing problems at their initial stages.
Your team should not stay on the sidelines. When employees have access to dashboards, they can monitor key SaaS metrics like customer acquisition costs CAC, monthly recurring revenue MRR, and customer churn rate, which makes them more motivated and engaged in the company’s business objectives.
A mistake many founders make is sharing with their employees a few general metrics once a year (like Churn and MRR). Such practice doesn't give the team much sense of what was right or wrong. Moreover, they can't get a clear idea of cause and effect. Instead, keeping them in the loop with modern SaaS KPI dashboards that provide continuous visibility into metrics such as customer acquisition, new customers, and annual recurring revenue, helping teams quickly notice any drop in key SaaS metrics, so they can immediately dig into a problem and offer solutions for improvement.
Dashboards come in all shapes and sizes. But not all of them are equally effective. The best SaaS dashboard solutions focus on the essential metrics that truly reflect business health and the company’s growth trajectory.
Not sure what dashboard you need for your SaaS business? Wonder how to create one? Have doubts about what matters most? Read on, we'll figure it all out.
Types of SaaS dashboards
Most businesses fail to define what purpose their dashboard should serve and create one that answers multiple purposes. Typically, they end up with blurred objectives and priorities.
As a starting point, consider these three SaaS dashboard types to define your needs:
Analytical dashboards
Analytical dashboards are used to investigate trends or deeper insights to understand what happened in the business, and what changes you should make in the future. Product managers and business analysts rely on them to monitor key SaaS metrics, interpret SaaS data, and uncover patterns that help identify trends in customer activity.
Strategic dashboards
Strategic dashboards are used mostly by CEOs with a focus on the company's top-level KPIs. A well-designed SaaS executive dashboard provides an overview of metrics like monthly recurring revenue, annual recurring revenue, and other indicators that define long-term business profitability.
Operational dashboards
Operational dashboards are used for employee awareness, tracking the day-to-day operations of each team in real-time. These KPI dashboards help departments monitor customer retention, user engagement, and operational metrics across marketing, sales, and support teams.
In this example, in the lower right section, the highest response time is on Saturday. Using this insight, the team can improve their work process either by changing their schedule or by hiring more people to protect customer satisfaction and reduce possible customer churn.
Key metrics to track
A SaaS metrics dashboard is only as powerful as the metrics included in it. But how do you know what to include? Let's find out what metrics are the most relevant (aka basic) for SaaS businesses.
Back in 2013, Zendesk investor Christoph Janz shared his thoughts on useful metrics SaaS companies should track. I think they are great as a starting point. Christoph gives his SaaS metrics template for free as an Excel file helping founders monitor key SaaS metrics and get a bird's-eye view of their business performance.
David Skok, a serial entrepreneur and investor, created a quite similar SaaS dashboard. It's more complex and includes metrics for companies using either annual or monthly contacts with sales calculations. Whereas Christoph Janz's Saas dashboard focuses mainly on monthly recurring revenue MRR with a low-touch sales model.
By the way, we also recommend that you read David's article about SaaS metrics.
Key metrics for the SaaS dashboard may vary according to the types of products. Summing up opinions from investors and SaaS company founders, we want to highlight several essential metrics for a dashboard that provide immediate access to the core of business health and help drive business growth.
MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)
The name speaks for itself — it’s the expected recurring revenue your SaaS business generates every month. Tracking monthly recurring revenue helps companies forecast future revenue and evaluate the growth trajectory of their business.
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
This metric reveals the average cost required to acquire a new customer. Understanding customer acquisition cost helps companies balance their marketing spend and evaluate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
LTV (Lifetime Value)
Lifetime value represents the revenue an average customer generates during their customer lifetime before they churn. When combined with CAC, this metric helps evaluate business profitability and long-term sustainability.
LTV/CAC Ratio
Comparing customer lifetime value to customer acquisition cost allows companies to determine how much they can safely invest in customer acquisition and still maintain healthy cash flow and sound pricing strategies.
ARPA (Average Revenue Per Account):
This metric represents the average revenue generated from each customer account over time (monthly/quarterly/yearly), which helps evaluate sales performance.
Churn rate
The churn rate (calculated monthly) represents the percentage of users who cancel their subscription each month. Monitoring customer churn helps teams identify risks to user retention.
Retention
Retention (calculated monthly) measures the percentage of loyal subscribers using the product over time. Strong customer retention often indicates high user engagement, customer success, and healthy product adoption.
Expansion
Expansion represents additional recurring revenue generated from existing customers on a monthly basis through upgrades, add-ons, or expanded usage.
Key dashboard metrics can be modified for different purposes. A SaaS CEO dashboard may include additional metrics such as New Contract Value (sales results), Pipeline, and Customer Health. But remember to keep it simple. Don't cram in too much information. The easier the better.
Tracking these key performance indicators through well-designed analytical SaaS dashboard tools allows leaders to transform raw data into actionable insights and make faster data-driven decisions.
And mind, a good SaaS dashboard should not overload users with information. Instead, it should surface the essential data needed to evaluate business performance and support critical business decisions.
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North Star Metric as a growth driver
The majority of entrepreneurs don't include the North Star Metric (NSM) in the list of key metrics that I've mentioned before. I think this is a big mistake. Just like a Polaris star, the NSM gives you the direction you are looking for.
So, what this North Star Metric is, you may wonder.
North Star Metric is a key measure of your product success. It's something you need to use as a focus for growth.
What is the biggest value that your users get out of your product? What can't they imagine your product without? Or, if you will, while using your product for the first time, do your users experience the aha moment?
This moment stimulates business growth, and the metric that captures that moment is the North Star Metric.
Here's how well-known SaaS companies defined their North Star Metrics:
- For Medium, it's total time spent reading
- For Slack - messages sent within the organization
- For Intercom - number of customer interactions
- For Zoom - weekly hosted meeting
- For Hubspot - number of weekly active teams
- For Quora - number of questions answered
As for Medium, their NSM reflects value for readers - an easy-to-use platform with interesting and useful content to read.
Quora, as a Q&A platform, is focused on the number of questions answered. Why so? Because the more questions users answer, the fewer questions are left unanswered, and the more value the platform brings to the user. Fair enough, we come to Quora for the core value they offer - the answers. The company's growth driver is the conversion of askers into answerers.
By the way, Quora’s NSM perfectly reflects the company's mission «to share and grow the world’s knowledge».
So, the NSM is the metric that everyone in the company can understand and work towards driving it. As a result, the business grows.
If you know your NSM, you can accelerate your business growth by focusing on one goal. Adding your NSM to your dashboard can serve as a guiding metric for anyone in your company.
SaaS KPI dashboard design and structure
Apart from metrics, informational architecture is what makes a dashboard an effective analytics tool. A good SaaS dashboard should communicate the most important insights at first glance to help teams make data-driven decisions. Here are some tips to follow when designing dashboards for SaaS applications.
Context
To tell if the metrics are good or bad, you need to provide context. By context, we mean some comparison either with the results from the previous month, or with industry standards, or with your goals.
Clear comparisons also help organizations identify trends and detect anomalies before they impact overall business profitability.
For example, a well-designed SaaS executive dashboard should help leaders understand business performance quickly by highlighting trends in financial data, recurring revenue, and customer retention.
Consistency
Use three graph types maximum (better two) so that your dashboard doesn't feel repetitive. If you track changes in trends over a set period of time, bar or line charts would be a great choice. Although pie charts are good for proportional analysis. Choose the most suitable graphs to keep your dashboard clear and easy-to-read.
Relevant use of color
Color creates visual cues that help us quickly identify good or bad trends at first sight. There are two mistakes to avoid: color misuse and overuse. They both lead to distraction and confusion. Thus, sometimes a dashboard seems like a drawing board.
So, why don't you define a range of colors that convey the meaning of your dashboard indicators? As we used to perceive it, red is for decline or alert, green is for growth, etc.
Numbers
Round your percentage to decimals and financial indicators to thousands (rarely hundreds). The majority of the dashboards don't need high-precision numbers displaying every cent. Such information distracts from the main dashboard objective - to give you a quick understanding of the state of things.
Size and position
Group interconnected metrics; position high-priority metrics on the top left of a dashboard and make their font size bigger.
When finished, take a five-second test. If a dashboard answers your questions within 5 seconds, then it's made clear. If not, go on improving it.
Read more about dashboard design and get inspired by examples.
How to create a SaaS metrics dashboard?
Of course, you can follow the methods given by Christoph Janz and David Skok and create your dashboard in Excel. But let's be honest, manual typing and updating your data is time-consuming.
There are platforms that take the weight off your shoulders. Let's review some of them.
Baremetrics
SaaS analytics platform for subscription-based businesses. Integrates payment platforms like Stripe, Chargebee, Recurly, Braintree, App Store Connect, and Google Play. You can add other payment provider using their Analytics API. Reports can be sent to Slack or email.
Geckoboard
A dashboard software that allows you to create well-designed live dashboards and easily share them with your team. You can customize visualizations based on your team and business needs. Metrics can be displayed on a TV or any big screen, browser tab, and mobile phone. It integrates 60+ data sources like GitHub, Google Analytics, Jira, Stripe, Zendesk, MySQL, and many more.
Mixpanel
Analytics service for web and mobile applications that tracks how customers interact with them. It offers real-time highly-customized dashboards with 50+ data source integrations. Also, Mixpanel supports Slack and email reporting.
Klipfolio
Online analytics platform for creating real-time dashboards for businesses of all kinds and sizes. Integrates 100+ data sources.
ChartMogul
Analytics platform for subscription businesses. Integrates payment platforms like Stripe, Shopify, Chargify, Recurly, etc. It allows additional integrations from MailChimp, Pipedrive, and Zapier to enrich customer analysis.
SaaS dashboard examples
Now that you understand the structure of a strong dashboard, let’s look at a few SaaS dashboard examples that demonstrate how different teams use data in practice.
General SaaS dashboard
This example is based on the metrics taken from Christoph Janz's template. The basic growth markers on this SaaS dashboard give a clear picture of business health for both the founder and the team.
MRR lines show how the company is growing over time, while CAC, ARPA, and other metrics display what drives or slows down the business' rise.
User Experience dashboard
On the UX Operations dashboard, charts like churn and win rate give insight into how customers interact with your product. Also, purchase and sign-up funnels are split into stages that explain task completion rates. This information allows you to spot the phase that can negatively affect conversion rates.
Marketing dashboard
This SaaS marketing dashboard for subscription businesses features customer acquisition metrics and their impact on MRR. While tracking trial performance, marketers should always keep an eye on user churn. That is why they are grouped on one side of the dashboard.
Feature launch dashboard
The feature launch dashboard is better to display in real-time on TV so that teams working on it could see how the new feature is performing and identify critical moments.
This dashboard highlights key metrics for marketing and development teams involved in the project. The right side shows the analysis for users' behavior in a feature-usage funnel. When the left side displays signup to customer conversion rate.
Bridging it all together: from SaaS dashboards to action
The true value of an analytics dashboard can't be underestimated. When used correctly, SaaS dashboards provide teams with the visibility they need to monitor performance, understand trends, and make smarter decisions. And once you understand what metrics are growth drivers, go on creating more detailed dashboards for different departments in your company. Be sure, everyone will benefit from the focus they get.
To unlock the full potential of dashboards, you should:
- Identify your needs
- Select the right metrics to track
- Keep the dashboard clear and simple
- Share the dashboard with your team
When you know the growth metrics that you track daily, and focus your and your team's efforts to drive them, you are in the right direction. Because a well-designed SaaS dashboard offers more than just numbers — it helps teams turn raw data into meaningful insights that support data-driven decisions and your long-term business objectives.
And yes, sometimes even minor changes in user flow, onboarding process, or in design overall, can give major improvements in metrics on your dashboard.
At Eleken, we helped many SaaS companies reach their maximum potential with the help of thoughtful design solutions. Feel free to check out the case study of how we helped our client reduce a 90% churn rate or how we helped double activation rates, among many others. If that's something you're currently looking for, drop us a line and let's talk.
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