Launch day floods you with numbers. Most of them you cannot act on, and staring at the wrong ones costs you the day. The metrics worth watching answer two questions: is the machinery working, and where should I spend my energy right now. Here are the five I would watch, and two I would close, with the reasoning for each labeled as advice rather than law.
Photo by Neil Fernandez via Unsplash, free to use under the Unsplash License
1. Real-time active users
Google Analytics has a Realtime report that shows active users on your site in the last 5 and 30 minutes, per Google's own documentation. On launch day this is your pulse check. It tells you the spike actually arrived, and it tells you the site is staying up under it. If you post on Product Hunt at 12:01 AM Pacific and the number stays at zero, something is wrong with your tracking or your link, and you want to know that in minute five, not hour six.
2. Your one key action
Pick a single conversion before launch day: signup, waitlist join, first project created, whatever counts as activation for your product. Google Analytics lets you mark events as key events, which is exactly the slot for it. Advice, not law: I would rather watch one number that means someone got value than ten that mean someone showed up. Decide tonight what "worked" means, or launch day will decide for you.
3. Where users are coming from
The same Realtime report breaks down active users by source and medium. This is the most actionable number of the day. If Hacker News is sending people and Product Hunt is not, you know where to spend the next hour answering comments. If a newsletter you forgot about suddenly drives traffic, you know to go thank them. Without this breakdown, you are guessing which room to stand in.
Photo by Алекс Арцибашев (@lxrcbsv) via Unsplash, free to use under the Unsplash License
4. Comments and questions on your launch posts
Not a dashboard number, and still the highest-value signal of the day. Product Hunt's own launch guide tells makers to spend launch day present and answering comments quickly and honestly. Every question is a reader telling you what your page failed to explain. Write down the ones that repeat. They become next week's landing page edits and your next post.
5. Errors and uptime
A traffic spike is the most likely time for something to break, and the worst time for it. Judgment call: check your error tracking or hosting dashboard a few times during the day instead of trusting silence. A page that fails for one visitor in ten still lets your metrics look healthy while quietly burning your best hour of traffic all year.
Set it up the night before
None of this works if you improvise it at midnight. Twenty minutes the evening before: confirm your analytics is recording events at all (open your own site and watch yourself appear in Realtime), mark your key action as a key event, and bookmark the three dashboards you will actually open. Launch day has a way of eating the time you planned to spend configuring things, so do the configuration while nothing is on fire.
Ignore: total page views
A raw view count feels like progress and tells you nothing you can use. Ten thousand views from a platform whose users never sign up is worth less than five hundred from one whose users do. The number to pair with every view count is the source (metric 3) and the key action (metric 2). Alone, it is confetti.
Ignore: your ranking, refreshed every five minutes
You cannot act on your position on a leaderboard. Refreshing it produces anxiety, not users. Product Hunt decides featuring on its own criteria, and your rank moves on other people's schedules, not yours. Check it a couple of times during the day if you must, then go back to the comments, which are the one place your effort actually moves the number.
One more thing worth doing while the day is fresh: when the spike fades, put your launch somewhere it keeps working. I run StartupWiki's launch board, a free place to list your launch for ongoing discovery after launch day ends. The metrics above tell you how the day went. A listing is how the day keeps paying.
Recap
Watch active users, your one key action, traffic sources, comments, and errors. Ignore raw view counts and your leaderboard position. The point of launch-day metrics is not to measure the day. It is to run it. Pick your numbers tonight, and spend tomorrow on the people behind them.
I write about startups and launching every week on my Substack.
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