How to Analyze User Engagement: Sand Hill Exchange Case Study

As engineers, we care immensely about user engagement metrics. For the last several months, our most engaged users have been originating from a single IP address.

The key to building a compelling product is to understand the customer. Using free analytics tools, we performed a comprehensive analysis of our users.

We use Google Analytics, which anonymizes IP addresses. However, we can segment our users by location. Here, we filtered out our users from the Washington DC metro area and identified their service providers.

Next, we selected the most frequently used network provider, “u.s. securities & exchange commission”. Twenty-eight unique users have come to our site through this provider.

Google determines user demographics by storing a cookie in your web browser. This cookie tracks every web site you visit so that Google can serve targeted ads. According to Google’s profiling service, these 28 individuals from DC come from a very uniform demographic.

Here are some things that they like, based on what they look at on the internet.

31% of them are seeking employment opportunities! Are you listening, Goldman Sachs?

As far as technology, they only use outdated versions of Internet Explorer and BlackBerry devices. This is unfortunate, because our web developers did not optimize for either of those browsers.

In total, these users have spent 64 hours, 6 minutes, 26 seconds (and counting!) engaging with our site between March 10 and May 14. Over 96 hours if you include time on the blog and the founder’s personal website. This is more time than our team spent building the damn web page. We have clearly achieved product-market fit with this demographic.

Successful marketing and scalable product adoption means understanding our most engaged users, and figuring out how to reach more of them. I think we know how to do just that.