Tech Profile: Trendslide

What is Trendslide, and how did you and your team get started in this field?

Trendslide is a mobile dashboard that connects with your most important business data sources (i.e., Google Analytics, Salesforce, Facebook, Twitter and more) and provides actionable insights right on your iPhone or iPad. Everyone typically has three to four key metrics they use to determine the success of their business; Trendslide provides access to these key metrics from anywhere, and there are proactive notifications to guarantee that your company drives those metrics for success and growth.

We got started building Trendslide when we had our own need for a dashboard that was tied to more than just a desktop. Mobility is more than just a feature — it’s the way we are all collaborating and talking to one another. As a result we set out to build Trendslide for a way to not only get your metrics on the go, but also ensure that you are steering your business to success.

How should the marketing/advertising industry utilize Trendslide to create better end-results for its clients’ web marketing strategies?

The base of a great marketing or advertising strategy is measurement. At the end of the campaign, you will look over a set of metrics to ensure that the strategy and goals that were set at the beginning were achieved. With Trendslide you can watch for small iterative changes that need to be made within the day-to-day of the campaign. The overall strategy may not change, but the results will be improved based on decisions made on actual data.

What trends and changes in the market led you to realize that Trendslide would fill a void? Describe the void.

Analytics are coming into our daily lives. Between the six tabs that we all open every day to comb over our latest engagement numbers and the increase in sales of smart phones and tablets, we knew there had to be an awesome solution that was lightweight and could make it easy to access your top-level KPIs. We set out to fill the void of communication within analytics and enable collaboration on data to drive success of marketing and advertising campaigns, and ultimately the business.

How does Trendslide put the power of performance monitoring into the hands of small startups without the time or manpower to pour over analytics all day long?

Trendslide connects to important data sources that startups and SMBs will use, such as Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter and more. With our simple setup process, they can now start receiving an aggregate view of key business metrics instead of logging into multiple sources just to view high-level metrics. In addition, at a time defined by the user within the Trendslide app, we will notify you of an important metric that may need attention. For example, if your lead form is down, Trendslide will alert you that leads are trending down so you can investigate the root cause. The fact is that most of us have monthly management meetings where we dive into the metrics that matter to our business, but in the time in between we lose sight of how we are performing. Trendslide is all about helping you make those small iterative changes that lead to success so you don’t find out that you were behind target in your management meeting.

What are some of the types of metrics that app developers and marketing managers should be monitoring?

It’s difficult to say across the board, but here are a few basic metrics that I would measure in both categories.

App Developer:

• Revenue
• Downloads
• Session frequency
• Active users/unique users
• User retention

Note: as an app developer/publisher, web traffic can also be an important driving factor, so I would likely monitor a few of the key web metrics as well, such as goal conversion rate and unique visitors

Marketing Manager (for a SaaS company):

• Unique visitors
• Goal conversion rate for all of the critical lead funnel activities
• Cost of customer acquisition
• Social “likes”/followers for respective service
• Social engagement

How does Trendslide work with existing analytics software? Can it show metrics from multiple data sources at once?

Trendslide securely connects to other sources like Google Analytics, Facebook and others via OAuth and simply requires you to put in your username and password for each service. Then you can turn on the metrics that you want to view. We are currently working on the ability to overlay metrics from multiple sources, and it should be available soon.

What should marketing managers keep in mind when reviewing analytics? How should they work with other departments and KPIs to understand the overall performance of a project?

First, a whole team or management should set what the key performance indicators are going to be for the project they are working on and get an agreement up front. Once this is done, the team can use Trendslide to communicate on those KPIs without necessarily needing another meeting. Even with this in mind, it would be a good idea to meet over the project life cycle at different stages to be sure that you are on track and will meet all of your performance targets.

Marketing should reach out to other departments to seek input on the metrics they need to measure and ensure that monitoring is set up, but they should also determine how to build that into the KPIs that the business already has.

Marketing managers should consistently review their most important metrics, but regularly do deep dives to understand more advanced processes like visitor flow and funnel conversion, and then run A/B testing based on what they see in the data. Testing and improving should always be at the forefront of a marketing manager’s mind. Optimizations and improvements can always be made, and it’s when we stop looking or settle that we allow things to slip by.

How do you see mobile performance monitoring and analytics tools evolving in the next three to five years?

Mobile will become the primary consumption and collaboration device for analytics. As a device that is always with the user, the ability to review metrics quickly on the train into work or just when walking down the hallway to a meeting will save time and also guarantee professionals have a constant pulse on their key business data.

Jeffrey Vocell is co-founder at Trendslide, a mobile dashboard startup building a collaborative platform to get all your key metrics anytime, anywhere. He has spoken at a number of conferences including Disruptivate, XSITE and Startup Weekend and regularly blogs at Trendslide about marketing and business analytics.

Jeffrey holds a Bachelors of Science from Daniel Webster College in Management & Leadership with a minor in marketing. In his free time he enjoys cycling and flying. Reach out to him at Jeffrey@trendslide.com or on LinkedIn.