When it comes to boosting your product growth, user analytics tools can make your life a lot easier. These tools offer insights into product performance, what your users are doing inside your product, and why they are doing it.
But how do you know you’re picking the right tools?
In this article, we share key insights on user analytics tools based on their use cases. This will allow you to pick the right tools to help you build more successful products.
Get The Insights!
The fastest way to learn about Product Growth, Management & Trends.
What is user analytics?
User analytics focuses on user behavior inside your website or product. It records user activity, groups them into behavioral segments, and analyzes key user metrics such as engagement and conversion.
User data helps you track user behaviors in relation to product engagement, retention, lifetime value, conversion rates, and ultimately revenue. You can measure user actions or behavior by firing custom events or clicking on the front end (feature tags).
With the right tools, user analytics can offer insights to understand the perceived value of your product. These user analytics tools can provide identifiable data (i.e. Userpilot) or non-identifiable data (i.e. Google Analytics).
Why is user analytics important for SaaS?
Understanding your users in SaaS is critical to creating better products, implementing more effective marketing strategies, and improving retention.
But user data has no meaning without user analytics.
User analytics helps understand how your users interact with your product. You can analyze the user journey by assessing the user behavior that happens across all touchpoints in the user journey.
For example, if you notice users failing to adopt a feature even after requesting it, it might mean that the feature is not in an intuitive place in your product or they need help with more in-app guidance.
How do you choose the right user analytics platform?
A range of factors come into play while choosing the right user analytics platform, including your product and business goals.
Your business goals help identify the KPIs you need to improve. This enables you to create your data taxonomy, which acts as the base for the analysis done by the web analytics tools.
Apart from these, here are the criteria to consider when choosing an analytics tool:
- What does it measure?
- Does it measure website user activity or in-app user activity? Page views or clicks?
- Does it measure identifiable data (e.g., so you can identify the user by unique ID, email, and more) or anonymized data (which is impossible to identify)?
- What type of analytics is it? Quantitative or qualitative?
- How easy is it to set up?
- How does it fit in with your existing tech stack and technology?
Best in-app user analytics tools for SaaS
With the ability to comprehensively understand user behavior, these tools pave the way for data-driven decision-making and improved in-app user experiences. Here are some of the leading options for in-app user analytics that can elevate your SaaS business:
1. Userpilot
Userpilot is a product growth platform that drives user activation, feature adoption, and expansion revenue. It also helps product teams collect user feedback, streamline onboarding, and gather actionable insights from analytics.
You can track both quantitative and qualitative data to get a holistic view of how customers use your product. This helps guide future development, improve the user experience, and inform your growth efforts.
Here’s an overview of Userpilot’s analytics features:
- User dashboard: Access all your user data in one place. Filter by segments, user or company properties, and more. View user insights and compare data for different periods and glean meaningful insights.
- Conditional segmentation: Create segments for users or companies that meet certain conditions. For instance, you could analyze disengaged users to see where they might be facing friction.
- Analytics reports: Track and analyze customer behavior with trend reports, funnel analysis, path analysis, and cohort analysis. You’ll also be able to edit the reports, sort by report type, filter by the teammate who created the report, or export in bulk if you need a CSV of your user analytics.
- Heatmaps: Track user interactions with various UI elements to identify areas of high and low engagement. This helps guide UX design for a better user experience.
- Analytics dashboards: Access several dashboards available within the Userpilot analytics tool. These include the product usage dashboard, the core feature engagement dashboard, and many more. You can also create custom dashboards to view web analytics most valuable to you.
- Survey analytics: Extract meaningful insights from your surveys with in-depth feedback analysis.
Also, there are multiple analytics features in the works, such as session recordings and AI analytics coming soon to Userpilot.
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).
2. Mixpanel
When it comes to in-app user analytics, Mixpanel is an analytics platform that offers great functionality in terms of tracking and collecting user data in real-time.
But if you’re a beginner in user analytics, Mixpanel can be quite complex. It requires users to define every event before capturing customer data. Although Mixpanel excels in tracking and collating real-time user data, it’s often harder to implement compared to traditional analytics tools.
Setting up reports is necessary to make the best use of the collected data. But this is a tricky and time-consuming process.
Despite all its shortcomings, Mixpanel can be a great option for large companies with in-house data and product managers. These organizations usually have complex data analytics needs that feed on a vast collection of data which is right up Mixpanel’s alley.
Pricing
Mixpanel doesn’t come cheap. Although its Growth package is just $25 per month, you’re more likely to be disappointed with it. This is a tool that offers the most to enterprise users.
In general, Mixpanel’s pricing plan is divided into three plans. Here’s an overview of the pricing plans and features of each plan:
- Starter plan: This plan features essentials to find product-market fit. It is free and allows up to 20M monthly events.
- Growth plan: This costs $20+ per month for up to 100M monthly events. You get all features in the starter plan plus unlimited saved reports to monitor, update, and iterate on KPIs, Mixpanel modeling layer, and group analytics and data pipeline add-ons.
- Enterprise plan: This plan empowers your team, especially if you have a large organization. It costs $833+ per month for up to 5M-100M+ monthly events.
3. Heap
Heap offers analytics tools for tracking in-app user interactions and offers a comprehensive user analytics suite.
Unlike Mixpanel (which requires an extensive setup before tracking data), Heap starts tracking user activity from day one with a code snippet.
Since Heap tracks everything, you won’t find event data in the analytics dashboard except for sessions and page views.
To see specific details of other events, you have to use Event Visualizer, which is a point-and-click interface to label events. As you give it a name, you can see all the details relating to the event in Heap’s Explore event dashboard.
Event Visualizer in Heap
Moreover, you get user and account-level tracking and create custom events. You can use these custom events in funnels and cohorts. Besides, you can combine tracked data into your own custom “virtual events”.
Heap also enables analysis along multiple axes and behavioral segments. You can use its mobile app to stay updated on the go.
Heap’s segment criteria
Pricing
So, what’s the catch?
Heap doesn’t come cheap. Its free package is fairly restricted in usage terms, and the pricing of its paid plans starts from $3,600 per year. Nevertheless, it does offer a 14-day free trial for you to see if it works for your SaaS company.
4. Amplitude
Amplitude is another popular analytics tool, which is more focused on user journey analytics. It also comes equipped with a wide range of two-way integrations with other platforms.
PathFinder in Amplitude
If you’re looking for an analytics solution to track single-user tracking across different products, Amplitude can be a good option for you.
Amplitude’s focus on data security is also worth mentioning. Its robust data governance and security features can be attractive to users given the increasing concern about data security in recent years.
However, similar to Mixpanel, Amplitude requires you to configure certain events before you start tracking them.
Pricing
One aspect where Amplitude stands out from the rest is its generous free plan, which allows you to track up to 10 million actions. This is a lot by any standards. Apart from this, Amplitude pricing for paid plans isn’t quite affordable and can get increasingly expensive at an alarming rate.
- Starter plan: Start for free to get a taste of Amplitude. Access starter templates, foundation analytics, session replays, and more.
- Plus plan: For $49/month, access unlimited analytics, custom dashboards, behavioral cohorts, custom audiences, and more.
- Growth plan: Contact sales for a custom quote. This includes advanced behavioral analysis, custom metrics, A/B testing, and more.
5. FullStory
FullStory is one of the best web analytics tools for session recordings, but it can also be quite handy as a user analytics tool because of its ability to track user interactions and create conversion funnels to analyze user behavior.
Define events to track user behavior in FullStory
By using a combination of session recordings, click maps, and scroll maps, you can see how users interact with your products. You can easily track and measure “rage clicks” – which lets you know when a user is venting their “rage” on their mouse.
Track and measure “rage clicks” using FullStory
Pricing
So… is there a catch?
Well, yes – this is not one of the free web analytics tools you are looking for! You can only get a price quote from FullStory upon request, which leads us to suspect that it might be rather high. Nevertheless, it offers a 14-day free trial, and its paid plans – Business and Enterprise – are negotiable.
Best web analytics tools for SaaS
Analyzing user behavior on your web platform is critical for improving your SaaS product’s performance. So let’s go over some of the best website analytics tools currently on the market.
6. Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics is one of the leading traditional web analytics tools that offers a deep understanding of user behavior patterns and data insights.
One of the key differentiators of Adobe Analytics is its ability to collect and analyze vast amounts of data accurately and reliably without the need for sampling.
It allows businesses to capture, aggregate, rationalize, and understand vast amounts of disparate data and translate that data into singular customer profiles.
With advanced segmentation tools, users can group and analyze specific data to gain deeper insights about their users.
Segmentation dashboard in Adobe analytics
This provides users with a more detailed and accurate view of their customers’ behavior, which can be used to identify trends, patterns, and problems.
However, the complex user interface can be overwhelming for first-time users, and it can be an expensive choice for most small and medium-sized businesses.
Pricing
Adobe Analytics can cost more than $100,000 a year, depending on how many hits you have.
7. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is regarded as one of the best web analytics tools for SaaS businesses. But it’s also used for user analytics. Google Analytics helps analyze user actions, website traffic, and product achievements.
Here are some ways SaaS companies leverage Google Analytics as a web analytics tool:
- Event tracking: Access several auto-collected events for marketing analytics and conversion purposes. To track product events, you have to define events and set trigger conditions in Google Tag Manager – which is often a bit complex for non-tech users.
Auto-collected event list in Google Analytics
- Product data import: The product data import feature is excellent for tracking user behavior and conversions. Users can import data into Google Analytics. This simplifies and reduces the amount of data you need to send by importing product data.
- Customer Journey Report: With charts like funnels and paths, you can visualize and analyze the steps users take before completing a desired action.
Funnel analysis in Google Analytics 4
- Custom reports: Create custom reports to measure website traffic, sessions per user, and much more. This makes it one of the most popular marketing tools.
Pricing
Unlike most other website analytics tools, Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that provides marketing analytics to small to medium-sized businesses. There’s also custom pricing for enterprise customers.
8. Hotjar
Hotjar is another robust user and website analytics tool with a brilliant heatmapping feature and powerful features for collecting implicit in-app feedback.
As one of the popular web analytics tools, it allows you to record browser actions for users while they are on your website. This includes clicks, scrolls, and mouse movements. Its session recording functionality can open a whole new world of insights into user activity.
Identify areas of friction in your customer adoption journey, which you can promptly fix to reduce time to value (TTV) and increase your retention rates. You can also improve user experience by finding out where your UX is broken or buggy.
Session recordings in Hotjar
Moreover, you can optimize your marketing funnels by figuring out where your users are bouncing. When you put these insights together, you can map out the entirety of your user life cycle, from the moment they come to your website to the moment they become a power user.
Hotjar’s behavioral data from heatmaps, session recordings, and in-app surveys like NPS offers you a unique look into user engagement with your website.
Pricing
Hotjar offers a range of plans under different categories (Hotjar Observe, Hotjar Ask, Hotjar Engage), as well as custom packages, providing flexibility for users to find a plan that suits their requirements.
- Plus starts at $39.00 per month.
- Business starts at $99.00 per month.
- Scale starts at $389.00 per month.
It also comes with a Free Forever Plan with limited features.
Conclusion
It might take a good amount of effort on your part to just pick the right set of user analytics tools to use. To summarize the process, you need to identify your business and product goals, set the criteria according to your needs, and pick the tools that meet these criteria.
Want to get started with User analytics? Get a Userpilot Demo and see how you can get actionable user analytics and insights for your SaaS product.
Try Userpilot and Take User Analytics to the Next Level
About the author
