[that_guy_iain]

Referer works standalone with search consoles.

Page visits tell you have many people you get. If you then use how many sign ups you get then you have a conversion rate. That’s an important figure. Page visits can also tell you if your marketing efforts have worked. Imagine doing all the marketing work and not knowing if it did anything.

[pickledoyster]

OP clearly stated that signups and MRR are the really important figures for SaaS. Not incidentally, those two metrics also tell you if your marketing efforts are working.

[that_guy_iain]

> Not incidentally, those two metrics also tell you if your marketing efforts are working.

No, they don't. They don't tell you if visits are up, if more people heard of you or anything. They just tell you that x number of people signed up. We can guess that marketing is going better but maybe it's the time of year where more people need the service. If signups go down, maybe you just had downtime or something on your page was broken.

If you look at any number in isolation you're never going to get the full picture.

And your MRR can go up without any marketing. You can just do sales.

[michaelt]

> No, they don't. They don't tell you if visits are up, if more people heard of you or anything. They just tell you that x number of people signed up.

In my experience, it's extremely cheap and easy to get a load of fake page impressions from bots, or to buy your US-only company loads of pageviews from low-cost-of-living countries, or to expand the top of your sales funnel with weak prospects who'll never convert to sales.

Seems to me only a fool would pat themselves on the back for doing so.

[that_guy_iain]

What? Who is honestly doing that? Are you just making random stuff up?

Imma make my analytics look really good when they're crap because??? People buy fake followers because others can see it. No one else is looking at your analytics. And you sure as hell don't want to increase your page views since your conversion rate would tank and that's the most important metric.

[pickledoyster]

>They don't tell you if visits are up, if more people heard of you or anything.

Again, if you don't care about visits, you don't care if they're up. OP said it best: signups and MRR.

People hearing about you: do you seriously believe that website analytics are suitable tools that provide reliable metrics for brand/product awareness, recognition, product-market fit, etc.?

>maybe it's the time of year where more people need the service. If signups go down, maybe you just had downtime or something on your page was broken.

Exactly, seasonality and website uptime / page functionality are important. They should be measured. At the same time, website analytics have nothing valuable to add to these measurements.

>And your MRR can go up without any marketing. You can just do sales.

I think you are circling around it: all those analytics metrics are just a means to justify the existence of useless 'marketers' who have no idea how to actually measure brand visibility, recognition, or any qualitative metric. These 'specialists' can't even fathom (heh) that business seasonality is something that shows up in a north-star metric and have no imagination or technical ability to set up a website monitoring service or a crawler, use a CRM for attribution, etc.

[that_guy_iain]

> OP said it best: signups and MRR.

Oh, they did. My bad. OP a god, they can't be wrong. Oh wait, I'm saying OP is a narrowminded and missing out.

> People hearing about you: do you seriously believe that website analytics are suitable tools that provide reliable metrics for brand/product awareness, recognition, product-market fit, etc.?

Why are you bringing up PMF when it comes to analytics. BUT! Yes, can. If your users are using your shit all the time and you got analytics all over your app, you've probably got a better

But remember when I said earlier looking a single stat in isolation is bad? Ssh.

> I think you are circling around it: all those analytics metrics are just a means to justify the existence of useless 'marketers' who have no idea how to actually measure brand visibility, recognition, or any qualitative metric. These 'specialists' can't even fathom (heh) that business seasonality is something that shows up in a north-star metric and have no imagination or technical ability to set up a website monitoring service or a crawler, use a CRM for attribution, etc.

"Useless marketers"...

Anyways, you're complaining about others people useless while you're saying all data except for your north star metrics are useless.

Imo, this is arrogance and ignorance mixed together.