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API Analytics for Product Managers

The API Analytics Cheat Sheet

Explore the critical API metrics grouped into infrastructure, product experience, and business categories. Learn how these metrics help ensure performance, improve user engagement, and align with business goals for effective API product management.

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API metrics

API metrics can be segmented into three main categories: Infrastructure, Product Experience, and Business metrics.

Infrastructure metrics provide insight into the performance and reliability of the API, such as uptime and availability. These metrics help ensure that the API is functioning correctly and that users are able to access it smoothly. Product Experience metrics measure how users interact with the API, such as the active users and time to first transaction. These metrics help understand how the API is being used, and identify areas for improvement. Business metrics focus on the impact of the API on the overall business, such as revenue, customer satisfaction, and user engagement. These metrics help understand how the API is contributing to the business objectives and goals.

Infrastructure metrics for API

Here are the infrastructure metrics for APIs.

Concept

Metrics

Performance

  • Uptime and availability
  • Errors per minute
  • Average and max latency
  • 90th percentile latency by customer

Usage

  • Request per minute (RPM)
  • Top endpoints
  • Usage by segments
  • CPU usage
  • Memory usage
  • Error code distribution
  • Concurrent connections

Reliability

  • Mean time to failure (MTTF)
  • Mean time to repair (MTTR)
  • Mean time between failure (MTBF)
  • Rate of occurrence of failure (ROCOF)
  • Probability of failure on demand (POFOD)

Product metrics for APIs

Here are the product metrics for APIs.

Concept

Metrics

Discovery

  • Unique visitors
  • Page views
  • Sign-ups by channel
  • Reading level or text complexity analysis
  • Link validation

Engagement

  • Bounce rate
  • Customer engagement score (CES)
  • Average time on page
  • Search keyword analysis
  • Engagement with tools

Acquisition

  • Daily user signups - New user
  • SDK and version adoption
  • Time to first hello world (TTFHW)

Activation

  • Time to first transaction (TFT)
  • Active users (DAU/WAU/MAU)
  • Time to value (TTV)
  • Cohort analysis

Retention

  • Recurring D/W/M usage
  • Customer retention
  • API calls per business transaction


Experience

  • Top customers by API usage
  • Daily support tickets per active users
  • Customer satisfaction scores (CAT)
  • Net promoter score (NPS)
  • Unique API consumers
  • Conversion rate

Business metrics for APIs

Here are the business metrics for APIs.

Concept

Metrics

Revenue

  • Monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
  • Revenue vs. forecast
  • Average revenue per account (ARPA)
  • Revenue by acquisition channel

Adoption

  • SDK adoption
  • Feature adoption

Churn

  • Churn rate
  • Cohort retention

Growth

  • Growth rate YoY
  • Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
  • Quota alignment
  • Net sales revenue
  • Cost per lead (CPL)
  • Customer lifetime value (CLV, LTV)

Operations

  • Support metrics
  • Beta vs. general availability
  • Paid support subscription rate by tier
  • Cost of infrastructure
  • Cost of outage
  • Incidents per month