User Behavior Tracking: How to Collect and Analyze Data [+Tools]

What is user behavior?

User behavior describes all the actions a user performs on a website or mobile app. It includes factors like time on the page, the number of pages visited, how people interact with different features, and also friction they encounter while using the product.

What is user behavior analytics?

User behavior analytics (UBA) is a technique for recording user activity and then combining and analyzing that data to understand how and why users interact with a product or website.

In essence, analyzing user behavior helps you understand users the same way you would in an offline setting. For instance, if you run a brick-and-mortar store, you can set up cameras to record how customers enter the mall and interact with your products.

Your on-site staffers will also notice some of these customer behaviors by just observing.

The information collected over time will allow you to decide on improvements you must make to better customer experience and increase sales. This is something user analytics helps you to replicate for your SaaS product and website visitors.

A traditional tracking tool like Google Analytics helps you know what’s going on with your website’s visitors, but it isn’t built to explain why site visitors behave the way they do.

User behavior analytics is different because it provides both quantitative and qualitative data—the what and the why—to facilitate better decision-making.

As we proceed in this article, you will see the different kinds of user behavior tracking, and tools to enable you to execute a proper user behavior analysis. But before we move on, it’s worth noting that there’s a difference between behavior analytics and behavioral analytics.

Both terms sound similar, but they are not.

Behavioral analytics is more concerned with predicting user behavior, while behavior analytics focuses more on optimizing the user experience.01:55:35

What are user behavior metrics?

User behavior metrics are analytics data that tell you how visitors engage with your website or app.

Key metrics to look out for as you track user behavior include:

Conversion (turning website visitors into trial users, then into paid users, etc).
Leading trial users to the “aha” moment and the activation point—the point where they instantly see how your tool makes life easier for them.
User activation.
Complete adoption.

Tracking each of these metrics tells you what points are flexible in the customer journey, places where users encounter friction, and what creates value for customers.

Types of user behavior analytics data you can track

There are different types of user analytics. We will go over three vital ones in this section and why we believe every product marketer should be tracking them.

Product and feature engagement tracking

These are event-based analytics that track user interactions across the app and allow you to see which UI elements users engage with the most.

You’ll be able to track user interactions such as clicks, hovers, or inputs to get an accurate behavioral view of specific features.

Tag features to monitor user engagement.

User sentiment data

User sentiment data dives into the emotional landscape of your customers’ experiences, offering a deeper understanding of their feelings.

User sentiment analysis uncovers the positive and negative emotions customers experience while using your product. It also collects valuable product improvement suggestions directly from the users.

By closely monitoring and evaluating user sentiment, businesses can pinpoint areas that delight customers and may require refinement. This feedback loop is crucial for driving product improvements and enhancing customer satisfaction.

Track user sentiment with Userpilot.

Session recordings

These are those recordings of user behaviors that you can watch and see what the users did in a specific session.

Session recordings can work well with product engagement analytics to provide more detailed information.

For instance, engagement analytics can tell how many product clicks happened per time, but session recordings make you see the reason for the clicks.

By watching those recordings and combining them with behavior reports, you can quickly identify rage clicks vs. normal clicks.

The data will enable you to quickly know when there’s a bug or point of friction that needs urgent attention.

Session recordings in Hotjar.

User experience analytics

This tracks customer experience on both your website and app with the end goal of enhancing usability.

There are two main types of user behavior insights to watch here:

Qualitative attitudinal metrics: This uses factors like loyalty, usability, and satisfaction to measure how customers feel about your product. Customer feedback is an essential tool for measuring qualitative data.
Quantitative behavioral metrics: This goes beyond user experience to measure how users interact with your product. Key product experience indicators here are retention rates, abandonment rates, churn rates, and task success.

So many factors make up the entire product experience that it can be hard to determine which to track.

Below are 7 of the most important user experience metrics to fix your gaze on:

Track NPS score with Userpilot. Get a demo and see how!

How to analyze user behavior in SaaS

So far, we’ve discussed what user behavior tracking is and the different types and metrics to look out for.

We’ve also hinted at a few benefits of tracking user behavior. Below are more detailed benefits of taking intentional steps to analyze user behavior.

Understand what brings value to different users with segmentation

All things equal, users will stick to a product if it solves their problem.

Tracking the features that customers spend the most time on will tell you what’s most valuable to them. And you can use this information to enhance long-term product engagement.

For instance, segmenting users based on engagement makes it easier to understand what brings value to each user group.

Create sophisticated segments with Userpilot.

Identify friction points in the user journey with funnel analysis

Funnel analysis lets you keep track of your customers’ progress through different stages of the journey. With it, you can identify drop-off points and then investigate them to determine where obstacles lie in the user experience.

Combining funnel analysis with session recordings or interviews will help understand why users are dropping off.

Done right, funnel analysis will help you make data-driven decisions and optimize your strategy to serve customers better.

Conduct funnel analysis with Userpilot.

Use path analysis to identify the happy path

Since the customer journey does not always follow a linear path, funnel analysis isn’t a suitable method in many situations.

This is where path analysis comes in. It allows you to choose a starting point and examine the steps users take to (or from) that point to achieve a goal.

With it, you can examine all the existing paths users take inside your product and identify the one with the lowest drop-off rates.

Document the sequence of events involved in achieving successful outcomes to understand the process that helps users complete their goals.

Identify the happy path by tracking all the paths users take inside the app.

Analyze user experience with user feedback surveys

You can analyze data quantitatively and try to guess the whys behind user actions. But that’s nothing compared to hearing directly from the horse’s mouth.

There are different types of micro surveys used to collect user feedback at various points in the user journey:

Onboarding surveys that collect data on user’s jobs to be done and help segment them;
NPS surveys that measure customer loyalty to the brand;
Customer satisfaction surveys measure how much a user is satisfied or dissatisfied at a certain point;
Customer effort score surveys measure the perceived effort of a user when completing a specific task;
Feature feedback surveys that collect feedback on a feature’s usability and user experience.

Create user surveys code-free with Userpilot.

Best tools for user behavior tracking

This section will cover three of the best tools to monitor and analyze user behavior.

We’ll go over features, who the product is ideal for, how much they cost, and their rating on Capterra and G2.

Userpilot: Best for in-app behavior tracking

“Behavioral analytics make it possible to monitor user activity, group data into cohorts, and extract relevant metrics/insights. Userpilot lets you tag features to see how users interact with them, compare goals by cohort, and create trend reports that track behavioral patterns over time.

Here are some Userpilot features you can use for user behavior tracking:

Funnel Reports: Funnel reports show you the total number of users that enter a funnel and the percentage of users that complete each step. This can help you track behavioral paths and see which stages most users get stuck on.
Trends Reports: Generating trends reports will help you visualize the occurrence of key events over time and break down these analytics by device, browser, operating system, country, signup date, or even individual user IDs and email addresses to see granular behavioral analytics.
Trends report in Userpilot.

Path Reports: Path analysis is useful for understanding common user behavior patterns, gauging user interactions with UI, monitoring if users follow recommended workflows, and identifying points of drop-offs and areas for improvement. With collected events, you can easily set up Path analysis in Userpilot without coding.
Analytics Dashboards: Userpilot also comes with a wide range of dashboards to help you track all the core product metrics i.e. product engagement, activation, retention, etc. – these play as signals for customer behavior changes.

Track key metrics with Userpilot.

User analytics: The user profile dashboard gives you an overview of all your users while letting you sort by segment, company, or when they were last seen. You can also click on each user or company profile for a more granular data breakdown of Top events, Top pages, Sessions, etc. Tracking user/company behavior on an individual level can help you see the perspective, as you’ll be able to understand how specifically they engage with your product or platform – which is useful for enhancing customer experience.

Zoom in onto a user and get granular insights into engagement.

Userpilot pricing

Userpilot’s transparent pricing ranges from $249/month on the entry-level end to an Enterprise tier for larger companies.

Furthermore, Userpilot’s entry-level plan includes access to all UI patterns and should include everything that most mid-market SaaS businesses need to get started.

Userpilot has three paid plans to choose from:

Starter: The entry-level Starter plan starts at $249/month and includes features like segmentation, product analytics, reporting, user engagement, NPS feedback, and customization.
Growth: The Growth plan starts at $749/month and includes features like resource centers, advanced event-based triggers, unlimited feature tagging, AI-powered content localization, EU hosting options, and a dedicated customer success manager.
Enterprise: The Enterprise plan uses custom pricing and includes all the features from Starter + Growth plus custom roles/permissions, access to premium integrations, priority support, custom contract, SLA, SAML SSO, activity logs, security audit, and compliance (SOC 2/GDPR).

Amplitude: Best for customer journey mapping

Amplitude is a product and website analytics tool that’s great for customer journey mapping.

Its combination of brilliant analytics features like user interaction and time-on-site tracking makes it a good choice for identifying users in real-time.

Amplitude’s secure data governance makes sure user data is safe by using randomly generated IDs to represent real users.

The main features of Amplitude include:

Event segmentation: Amplitude enables you to track and visualize user interactions in your product easily. See which events are most performed, analyze how many users complete certain events, and create charts to visualize your findings.
Customer journey visualization: Gain visibility into your different user journeys. You can check individual user paths and view the most common sequence of events completed by users.
Retention analysis: Calculate user retention data using pre-specified events and compare retention rates over time using a simple retention chart.

Amplitude pricing

Amplitude has a starter-free plan that includes core analytics and unlimited events tracked for up to 100K Monthly Tracked Users. To get access to more in-depth analytics like cohorts, journeys, and retention prediction you’ll need a Growth or Enterprise plan.

Growth and Enterprise plans come with custom pricing and give you access to advanced features and real-time monitoring for analyzing user behavior.

Hotjar –Best for session recordings

What makes Hotjar stand out is its focus on visual data. The tool uses heat maps and session recordings to show you real-time users’ behavior flow on your mobile app or web page.

Both beginners and experienced teams will find Hotjar useful for analyzing websites and product usage.

The analytics tool has a wide range of applications aside from its ability to directly monitor user behavior, so designers, marketers, and customer experience teams will find use cases for it.

Hotjar dashboard.

Here are some of the main features of Hotjar:

Session recordings: Hotjar provides real-time recordings of users’ and website visitors’ sessions. You can see how they scroll, where they click, and how they progress from page to page.
Heatmaps: Hotjar aggregates these session recordings into heatmaps showing which parts of your web pages users are interacting with and which features they miss.
Feedback collection: Directly ask users what they think about your website. You can create surveys, send survey invitation links to customers, or launch feedback campaigns on the site.

Hotjar pricing

Hotjar has 4 pricing tiers, including a free forever tier:

Basic: This forever free tier supports up to 35 daily session recordings and unlimited heatmaps.
Plus: For $32/month, you get up to 100 daily sessions and the ability to filter and segment data.
Business: Starting at $80/month, you get support for 500 daily sessions, custom integrations, and more.
Scale: Designed for enterprise users, this plan starts at $171/month for 500 daily sessions. It supports funnel analysis, trends analysis, and more.

Hotjar pricing

Pendo: Best for mobile user behavior tracking

Pendo is one of the best tools on the market for tracking the behavior of mobile users.

Pendo analytics dashboard

Here are the Pendo features you can use to track user behavior:

Funnel Charts: Pendo’s funnel reports show you the number of users that enter a funnel, the percentage that completes each stage, and the average completion time. You can also see the overall conversion rate, which helps you identify any underperforming user funnels.
Retention Analysis: The Retention dashboard can show you the percentage of each cohort that’s retained on a month-to-month basis. This will help uncover any behavioral patterns between cohorts and make it possible to perform a correlative analysis as well.
Path Reports: Pendo’s path reports help you visualize the paths that your users take when coming from a certain page. You can share these reports with other people on your team, zoom in on each step to get deeper insights, or download the path chart as a CSV file if needed.

Pendo pricing

Pendo offers a freemium version with its Free plan that you can use indefinitely until you exceed the limit of 500 monthly active users (MAUs).

The entry-level Starter plan starts at $7,000/year for up to 2,000 monthly active users. Also, by upgrading to the paid version, you’ll also gain access to additional features like NPS data.

Pendo has two more premium plans, Growth and Portfolio, both of which use quote-based pricing. The Growth plan unlocks additional features not available on the Starter plan but is aimed at those with a single product.

In contrast, the Portfolio plan is targeted toward businesses that develop multiple mobile and web apps. Those who go for the Portfolio plan will be able to view cross-application data that tracks actions, events, and paths between multiple products.

Pendo pricing

Crazy Egg – best heatmap analytics software

Crazy Egg is an easy-to-use user behavior analytics tool, focused on heatmap analysis. With this tool, you can investigate buyers’ journeys on your website, identify usability issues, and test new options to see how they perform.

Crazy Egg heatmaps

Crazy Egg’s main features include:

Heatmaps: Crazy Egg uses heatmaps to help you see which parts of your page receive the most and least attention. You can also compare the performance of different web pages by comparing their heatmaps.
Reports: In addition to heatmaps, Crazy Egg supports other forms of data visualization reports, including scrollmaps, confetti, overlay, and list reports. They track user behavior analytics through clicks, scrolls, and other pattern insights.
Recordings: Record user sessions and replay them to see user’s interactions with your website. These recordings also help you see what motivates visitors to stay on or leave a page.

Crazy Egg pricing

Crazy Egg offers five paid plans (from Basic’s $29/month to Pro’s $249/month). Should you need more than their typical offering, you can build your own subscription plan with Enterprise. You can also get a free 30-day trial for every plan.

Crazy Egg pricing

Conclusion

User behavior tracking is an excellent method for boosting product experience and increasing your retention rates, among other numerous benefits.

As we’ve discussed earlier, incorporating both quantitative and qualitative analytics will give you better results than choosing just one approach. And there are many tools in the market to help you with this.

Want to get started with user behavior tracking? Get a Userpilot Demo and start seeing how users are interacting with your tool.

User Behavior Tracking: How to Collect and Analyze User Behavior Data [+Tools]

What is user behavior?

What is user behavior analytics?

What are user behavior metrics?