The Growth Hacker’s Guide to Metrics, Tools and Reads

Earlier this week, we met with today’s leading growth leaders and marketers at the Growth Hackers Conference at the Belasco Theater in LA for an exciting day of learning and sharing.

Great growth hacking means leveraging data and relying on new technologies to test, optimize and identify the most effective approach to influencing business growth. Since we had many of the leading Growth Hackers in one room, we decided to survey them to learn three things:

1. What’s your favorite tool that you’ve discovered in the past six months?
2. What blog is a daily must-read for you?
3. What daily metrics do you look at?

Continue reading as we reveal the FULL list of resources to help you master the art and science of growth hacking, all backed by data.

The go-to tools:

• Segment: A single hub for for all your customer data.

• Amplitude: Product analytics to help marketers understand product usage.

• Adespresso: A Facebook Ads manager.

• Braze: Mobile marketing automation platform that enables marketers to manage the lifecycle of their customers and increase mobile engagement.

• Drift: Messaging platform for Marketing and Sales.

• Statsbot: Google Analytics, Mixpanel, SQL Bot for Slack.

• SEMRush: A complete workflow for any SEO/SEM professional.

• Insightly: Powerful and affordable cloud-based CRM for small businesses.

• Clevertap: A user engagement and analytics platform.  

• Firebase:  A mobile and web application development platform.

• Chatfuel: A bot platform for creating an AI chatbot on Facebook.

• Heap: Automatically captures every user action in your web or iOS app and lets you analyze it all retroactively.

• Chartio: A data exploration solution that allows you to connect, explore and visualize all of your disparate data to uncover and share actionable insights.

• Power BI: A suite of business analytics tools to analyze data and share insights.

• Tableau:  Interactive data visualization products focused on business intelligence.

• Google Analytics (Beta Cohorts): A web analytics service that tracks and reports website visits.

• Google Data Studio: Customized reports and dashboards.

• Google Tag Manager: A tag management system that allows you to quickly and easily update tags and code snippets on your website or mobile app.

• BrainTree: A simple, robust way to accept payments and enable buying from almost anywhere.

• Crazy Egg: Visual website analytics.

• Influitive: Helps companies mobilize their customer advocates to provide more referral leads, reference calls and social media advocacy.

• Salesforce Gmail Extension: Gmail to Salesforce lets you log emails automatically.

• mParticle: Provides a single API to connect and coordinate your entire marketing stack.

• TypeForm: Build online forms, surveys, quizzes, landing pages and much more without coding.

• aHrefs: SEO backlink checker and competitor research tools.

• Trello: A visual project management system, allowing marketers to stay organized with their campaigns.

• Zapier: Enables users to connect web apps together and use event-based automation to avoid repetitive tasks.

• Appsflyer: Leading platform for mobile attribution and marketing analytics.

• Lucky Orange: Website analytics and user recordings.

The daily must-reads:

• Growth Hackers: The go-to source for strategies, insights and tips in Growth Marketing, from the largest community of those in the know.

• Neil Patel: Co-Founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics.

• Tomasz Tunguz: Venture Capitalist at Redpoint writing about data-driven startup strategies.

• Reforge: Helps ambitious marketers fulfill their potential and share ideas across their community.  

• Moz: The world’s most popular provider of inbound marketing software.

• 7digits.net/blog: A measure-driven growth agency helping marketers reach their full potential.

• Salesforce Blog: A Sales blog authored by the leading CRM system.

• Backlinko: Helps marketers get higher rankings and more traffic to their site.

• Signal v. Noise: By the makers of Basecamp, sharing daily insights on business, design and technology.

• Andrew Chen: A weekly newsletter from Uber’s head Growth Marketer, sharing growth tips and marketing strategies.

• Dataleader.io: A blog dedicated to helping marketers learn Amazon Web Services.

• Nir & Far: A blog written by Nir Eyal about products and ideas that move people forward.

• Saastr: The go-to source for learning about running startups and moving through the SaaS industry.

• Both Sides of the Table: Perspectives of a 2x entrepreneur turned VC at @UpfrontVC, the largest and most active early-stage fund in Southern California.

• Grow.co: The leading community for growth-focused marketers. A hand picked round up of the best customer acquisition & retention links every week.

• Warrior Forum: A forum & marketplace with a community of 1+million digital marketers.

• This Week in Startups: Entrepreneur Jason Calacanis and a rotating group of guest experts discuss the best, worst, most outrageous and interesting stories of entrepreneurship.

The metrics that matter:

• Daily Active Users

• Retention Rate

• Activation Rate

• NPS

• Sales Qualified Lead

• Marketing Qualified Lead

• Monthly Active Users

• Daily items printed

• Daily Sign Ups

• Weekly Active Users

• Trial to paid conversion rate

• Growth Project Conversion

• Pipeline Health

• Subscriptions

• Paying users

• Free trials

• Referral Traffic

• Activation Rate

• Retention Rate

• Reach

• Impressions

• Interaction Rate

• ARPU

• Push Notification CTR

• Monthly Recurring Revenue

• Relevance Score

• Cost per Acquisition

• Opt-ins

Thanks to Sean Ellis, the entire Growth Hackers team and all the attendees for sharing your insights. See you at the next conference!