Best User Analytics Tools for SaaS
When it comes to boosting your product growth, user analytics tools can make your life a lot easier. These tools offer insights into 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 offer you key insights on user analytics tools based on their use cases, allowing you to pick the right set of tools to help you build more successful products.
TL;DR
- User analytics is a type of analytics that focuses on user/customer behavior inside a product/on a website.
- User data reveals how user engagement with your product impacts retention, conversion, revenue, and the outcomes you care about.
- Understanding user behavior is necessary to increase engagement, retention, lifetime value, conversion rates, and ultimately, revenue.
- The user actions (behaviors) users take within your product are measured by firing custom events or clicks on the front end (feature tags).
- User analytics can be divided into 3 types: Segment Analytics, Funnel Analytics, and Cohort Analytics.
- Adobe Analytics allows businesses to capture, aggregate, rationalize, and understand vast amounts of disparate data on user behavior patterns.
- Google Analytics helps you understand your website audience better by tracking key metrics, including acquisition and behavioral metrics.
- Hotjar collects data using multiple tools, including session recordings and analyzes them to generate a range of useful user behavior insights.
- Fullstory recreates user sessions by combining user data with the session recording to give you an accurate picture of user behavior and tracks user interactions, and lets you create funnels.
- Mixpanel offers great functionality in terms of tracking and collecting user data in real-time but requires you to set up events before tracking them.
- Heap is a comprehensive user analytics suite that tracks all sorts of in-app user interactions and requires no prior definition or configuration of events.
- Amplitude helps you create a holistic user journey by offering valuable insights into the user experience.
- Userpilot is a code-free platform that combines solid analytics features for actionable behavior analytics with the user sentiment and engagement layers. Want to check it out? Book the demo!
Looking for the best tool for user analytics? Search no more!
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 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 clicks on the front end (feature tags).
User analytics can be divided into three categories: Segment Analytics, Funnel Analytics, and Cohort Analytics.
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 a must if you want to create better products and more effective marketing strategies, streamline your ad spend, and most importantly – improve your retention.
But user data has no meaning without user analytics.
User Analytics in Userpilot
User analytics can help you improve your customer acquisition efforts, identify bottlenecks in the conversion funnel, and optimize your strategies to boost conversion. It also allows you to find out where users are dropping off in the onboarding flow.
This, in turn, can help improve user activation by optimizing your onboarding process to get more users to reach the activation point.
User analytics plays a key role in understanding how your users are interacting with your product. You can understand the user journey better by assessing the user behavior that happens across all touchpoints in the user journey.
This helps you to identify the issues they are facing and improve your UI and UX design naturally.
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.
Building reactive in-app experiences based on user analytics insights can help you tackle this issue promptly.
You can also measure user engagement in real time and iterate on product implementations. Most importantly, you can utilize user analytics to improve the crucial SaaS metric – customer retention, including Day One retention.
With a web analytics tool, marketers can:
- Look for bottlenecks that can impact your website conversion rates.
- Analyze user insights from user behavior during checkout to improve users’ checkout experience.
- Monitor a user’s journey to conversion, and measure user engagement in real time.
With a product user analytics platform, product managers can:
- Identify “positive” and “negative” user behavior patterns throughout the user journey stages.
- Utilize the insights from analytics dashboards to build in-app experiences that reinforce positive behavior.
- Improve user onboarding flows and experiences for multiple personas, which can help them boost day-one retention and improve FTUX (First Time User Experience).
- Maximize retention by understanding how the most successful users interact with your app and build more experiences to foster the adoption of “winning habits”.
- Push users further in their user journey by building secondary onboarding experiences.
- Push for upsells at exactly the right time in the user journey, allowing them to drive more expansion revenue.
How to choose the right user analytics platform?
A range of factors can come into play while choosing the right user analytics tools, including your product and business goals.
Your business goals will act as a guide while identifying the KPIs you need to improve. This will help you create your data taxonomy, which will act as the base for the analysis done by the User Analytics tools.
Apart from these, here are some of the criteria you should consider while choosing user analytics tools:
- What does it measure?
- How does it collect and measure data?
- Does it measure website user activity or in-app user activity? Pageviews or all 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 event-based analytics or qualitative session recordings?
- How easy is it to set up?
- How does it fit in with your existing tech stack and technology?
Once you’ve decided what criteria you’re prioritizing, you can go through the list we’ve compiled for you to help you find the right User Analytics tool for your SaaS business.
Best in-app user analytics tools for SaaS
Userpilot
Userpilot comes with a brilliant in-app user analytics solution that integrates with both Amplitude and Mixpanel and is completely code-free!
This tool allows you to track user behavior based on predefined goals. This offers you complete flexibility on which aspects of product usage you want to focus on – making it much easier to interpret and track user analytics.
Goals in Userpilot
Userpilot’s analytics are based on what users do within the app. It’s based on custom events (passed by the devs) or feature tags (that allow you to ‘tag’ a feature on the front end of your web app).
Track features and events in Userpilot
This medium-term analytics lets you build user segments and funnels based on your user activity in an intentional way.
You can filter user segments based on a wide range of contributing properties such as
- User ID
- Company data
- User interaction (features & events)
- Content engagement
- User feedback
Userpilot data segmentation
This allows you to see who is doing what in your app. With both quantitative and qualitative data, you can instantly act upon these analytics. You can build in-app experiences that help struggling users proceed further down the user journey.
But that’s not the only incredible thing about Userpilot.
Its real value lies in creating secondary onboarding experiences that ultimately help users unlock more and more value along their user journey.
Build secondary onboarding flows with Userpilot
At times, you might notice that basic users don’t discover certain features themselves after activating. If not resolved, this issue can increase your churn rates.
Kommunicate, a chatbot tool, had the same problem. They noticed that their customers kept asking for features that already existed in the product.
Kommunicate launched their onboarding experiments in Userpilot, which increased their percentage of signup-to-chatbot integration by 15 percentage points in 7 months.
Next, they noticed that their paying customers were adopting 5-7 key features. So they took all of these and plugged them into Userpilot’s product adoption feature.
After Kommunicate released small product adoption cues, its reach increased from 28% to 41% in 5-7 months.
Another “AHA moment” for Kommunicate was the “chat widget customization”. This is a very important cue for Kommunicate’s users to turn into paid customers.
Kommunicate chat widget customization built with Userpilot
Its introduction led to 86% of people completing the chat widget customization goal, which then translated to a 3% increase in the feature’s usage. This, in turn, had a substantial impact on Kommunicate’s MRR.
Wanna start creating similar experiences without a line of code – and boost your feature adoption? Sign up for Userpilot for FREE now and start increasing your product usage today!
Mixpanel
When it comes to in-app user analytics, Mixpanel is a powerful solution that offers great functionality in terms of tracking and collecting user data in real time.
Mixpanel product metrics dashboard
But if you’re a beginner in user analytics, Mixpanel can be quite a complex tool for you. Mixpanel requires users to define any event before capturing it. Although it excels in tracking and collating real-time user data, Mixpanel can be quite hard to implement compared to other traditional analytics tools.
Setting up reports is necessary to make the best use of the collected data. But this is quite a tricky and time-consuming process with Mixpanel.
Despite all its shortcomings, Mixpanel can be a great option for large companies with in-house data and analytics teams. These organizations usually have complex data analytics needs that feed on a vast collection of data that require a highly technical tool like Mixpanel to generate actionable insights.
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.
Heap
Heap tracks all sorts of in-app user interactions and offers a comprehensive user analytics suite.
Tracking events in Heap
Unlike Mixpanel (which requires an extensive setup before tracking data), Heap starts tracking user activity from day one. You don’t need to define or configure any events beforehand.
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 segmentation
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.
Amplitude
Amplitude is another popular user 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.
Amplitude customer journey analytics
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.
But 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.
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.
Fullstory session recordings
By using a combination of session recordings, click map, and scroll map, 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.
Configure signals in Fullstory
But… is there a catch?
Well, yes – this is not 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.
Best web user analytics tools for SaaS
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. Adobe Analytics can cost more than $100,000 a year, depending on how many hits you have.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a must-have web analytics tool for any SaaS business. It allows you to track key metrics (including acquisition and behavioral ones), which help you gauge your website performance better.
Google Analytics dashboard
You can even track the source of each conversion once you’ve set up your conversion points. Besides, you can track traffic sources and mediums, which helps you identify the acquisition channels bringing the most traffic.
But you should note that Google Analytics cannot be used to perform cohort analysis, as the data is not identifiable. However, it is still great for time-based analytics.
You might want to go deeper and use Google Analytics to track conversions and “Events”. For example, you might want to track which buttons on your site get clicked.
This is possible but will take a little more advanced skills on your part. The functionality doesn’t come out of the box; you need to figure it out yourself.
The best part is that Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool, which offers enough functionality for small to medium-sized businesses.
Hotjar
Hotjar is another robust user and website analytics tool that comes with a brilliant heatmapping feature and can be a great option for implicit in-app feedback.
As one of the popular web analytics tools, it allows you to record the browser actions of your 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.
You can identify areas of friction in your customer adoption journey, which you can promptly fix to reduce Time to Value and increase your retention rates. You can also improve user experience by finding out where your UX is broken or buggy.
Hotjar session recordings
Moreover, you can optimize your marketing funnels by figuring out where your users are bouncing. When you put all these insights together, you can effectively 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.
Besides, nothing is stopping you from revisiting your session recordings multiple times to deepen your level of analysis.
Hotjar offers you reliable qualitative data, which can work together with the quantitative data you get from its in-app surveys like NPS to offer you a unique look into user engagement with your website.
You don’t even need to stretch your budget too much for these powerful in-app customer feedback tools. Hotjar’s pricing starts at $39 per month, and you also get a generous free plan that comes with a lot of features.
Final thoughts
It might take a good amount of effort on your part to just pick the right set of user analytics tools. 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.
You can use user analytics tools like Mixpanel, Userpilot, Heap, or Amplitude to track app user actions within your app. For tracking user actions on your website, you can use tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, or FullStory.
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.
Looking for the best tool for user analytics? Search no more!
