The Best User Behavior Analytics Software for SaaS
Tracking user behavior is more than just tracking conversion rates. You need to clearly understand how different users engage with your product through qualitative and quantitative methods.
In this article, we’ll help you understand how you can measure user behavior, the best tools out there, and how to implement the collected data.
TL;DR
- User behavior analytics involves recording user activity, grouping them into behavioral cohorts, and analyzing metrics such as engagement and conversions.
- User behavior analytics helps you segment your users, identify UX bottlenecks, monitor user journeys, and more.
- Tracking in-app clicks using action cohorts helps you understand how each action of a user is related to another action and what purpose led them to take that action.
- Session recording puts you in your user’s shoes and helps you understand how your product feels to them by going through every action they have to take to complete each task.
- A well-defined funnel can get you valuable insights, which will help you understand where to focus your marketing efforts to convert more users.
- Combine conversion funnels with session recordings to get the best results while qualitatively measuring user behavior.
- Qualitative user behavior analytics tools include Userpilot, Heap, Mixpanel, and Amplitude.
- Quantitative user behavior analytics tools include Hotjar, FullStory, and LogRocket.
- You can use user behavior analytics data to map user journeys effectively, create meaningful experiences, remove UI bottlenecks, and set product development goals.
What is user behavior analytics?
User behavior analytics involves recording user activity, grouping them into behavioral cohorts, and analyzing metrics such as engagement and conversions.
Moreover, you can monitor how users are interacting with your product and how efficiently they’re passing through multiple stages of the user journey.
User behavior analytics also helps you identify the hurdles that your users come across so that you can find ways to ensure a smoother user experience.
Why is user behavior analytics important for SaaS?
User behavior analytics connect the dots among the data points and tell a story of how your users are engaging with your product.
User behavior analytics can help you create and improve customer segmentation. It can also help you identify bottlenecks, monitor a user’s journey to conversion, and track the features that click with users.
You can stay updated on each step of the user journey and adjust your growth metrics in real-time. If you know what you want your users to do and have a clearly defined roadmap for them, user behavior analytics can provide you with valuable insights to grow your SaaS business.
How To Measure User Behavior Analytics
How To Measure User Behavior Using Quantitative Methods
Monitoring in-app clicks isn’t as simple as it sounds. If you have a collection of user activity data that tells you which page generates the most clicks, it still doesn’t tell you the whole story.
This is because every click is an action, and every action has a purpose behind it.
Tracking in-app clicks using action cohorts help you understand how each action of a user is related to another action and what purpose led them to take that action. This will allow you to identify trends in user behavior over a specific period.
If you can track the elapsed time between two actions, you can use this information to identify any barrier users face while using your product.
For example, if users are taking longer than you expected to complete the onboarding, you might consider looking into it to find possible hurdles that are causing them to spend more time completing it.
How To Measure User Behavior Using Qualitative Methods
What if you could actually see how users are interacting with your app? This is where session recording comes in.
Session recording puts you in your user’s shoes and helps you understand how your product feels to them. You can observe how users interact with the product app, from launching it for the first time to completing the desired task.
This helps you go through every action they have to take to complete each task and understand how smooth their experience is.
Session recordings are particularly handy to understand the reason behind churn. You can go through the user’s experience with your product and identify what went wrong and why.
Another effective way of measuring user behavior is by using conversion funnels. This can help you pinpoint the phase where you’re losing the most users.
A well-defined funnel can get you valuable insights, which will help you understand where to focus your marketing efforts to convert more users.
Combining conversion funnels with session recordings can be a great way of measuring user behavior. You can monitor session recordings for key touchpoints like registration and onboarding.
If a user who looked likely to convert drops out of the funnel, you can monitor session recordings to determine the possible reason they did so.
Best User Behavior Analytics Software
Quantitative user behavior analytics software #1: Userpilot
Userpilot is a code-free platform that not only gives you access to a brilliant user behavior analytics solution, but also a unique onboarding tool.
It helps users find the most value from your platform by pushing information based on their interactions.
Features:
Userpilot allows you to track user behavior and improve the onboarding experience of your users using contextual flows. This contextual onboarding helps you to deliver the right message to the right user at the right time.
Userpilot’s user behavior analytics lets you track user activity efficiently and make adjustments when necessary. You can also leverage its A/B testing features to find out what’s working and what’s not.
To make things easier, you also have access to user segmentation tools for tracking user journeys based on each segment. Moreover, you can use the data gathered from micro surveys and NPS surveys to understand the perception of your product among users.
Overall, Userpilot offers a great solution to collect user behavioral data accurately and turn it into actionable insights to help you make informed decisions.
Pricing
Userpilot’s paid plans start from $299 per month for 2500 active MAUs. If billed annually, you can get a discounted price of $249 per month. Its Enterprise packages are a great option if you need more advanced customization features and priority support.
If you are intrigued by Userpilot’s brilliant contextual onboarding features, you can watch it in action before paying for it. Book a demo today and see for yourself!
Quantitative user behavior analytics software #2: Heap
Heap is a popular user behavior analytics platform that helps craft meaningful experiences that boost conversion and retention rates.
Features:
Heap doesn’t require any upfront configuration and captures data automatically, allowing much flexibility to its users.
Moreover, you can create customizable virtual events to use in funnels and cohorts.
Heap is a great option for users looking for a less technical analytics platform. You can also define events and conversions retroactively to keep up with changing scenarios.
Heap provides real-time reports and comes optimized for web and mobile applications alike.
Pricing
You can opt for the free version of Heap for up to 10k sessions per month. This includes 1 Project and Unlimited User Licenses. Although Heap doesn’t offer pricing information for its three paid plans – Growth, Pro, Premier, it does offer a free trial of 14 days.
Quantitative user behavior analytics software #3: Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a leading name in product analytics, and rightfully so. It provides in-depth and relevant analytics to help you track user behavior efficiently and accurately.
Features
Mixpanel’s powerful user behavior analytics tool lets you monitor how each segment of your customers is engaging with your product. This allows you to track and identify opportunities you can work on.
Mixpanel’s data science models effectively predict user activity, which lets you take proactive measures to prevent churn.
Mixpanel also has A/B testing features, which require you to have a bit of coding knowledge. However, it is worth the effort, given the value of its in-depth analytics.
Pricing
Mixpanel offers a free version that comes with limited features. Its paid plans start at $25 per month.
Quantitative user behavior analytics software #4: Amplitude
Amplitude is another great analytics tool to measure quantitative user behavior data. It comes with a wide range of integrations that help you expand its functionalities to a great extent.
Features
Amplitude offers in-depth user behavior analytics that lets you track user journeys and find the perfect route for users to become high-value customers.
It provides useful insights into customer experience and helps create a holistic user journey.
Amplitude also comes with great collaboration features for teams of all sizes. It is easy to use and configure and is flexible across multiple devices and products.
Moreover, Amplitude features brilliant data governance and data security features that ensure the maximum safety of user data.
Pricing
Amplitude offers a quite generous free plan that lets you track up to 10 million actions. The pricing information for its growth and enterprise plan isn’t listed publicly.
Qualitative user behavior analytics software #1: Hotjar
Hotjar is a behavior analytics platform for collecting user behavior data using multiple tools, including session recordings.
Features
Hotjar provides heat maps to help you track how users are interacting with your product, including scroll, movement, and clicks.
It also visualizes conversion funnels that make it easier to find loopholes and increase conversion rates.
Hotjar’s brilliant screen recording feature can give you a user’s perspective on your product. It also offers analytics that helps you visualize the user journey.
Pricing
Hotjar comes with three plans – Personal, Business and Agency. It offers a free basic version under its Personal plan and a paid version at $39 per month. Its Business plan comes with a 15-day free trial and starts from $99 per month for 500 daily sessions.
The Agency plan offers unlimited client sites in one central account and the option to rebrand its interface with your logo.
Qualitative user behavior analytics software #2: FullStory
FullStory is another popular session tracking platform that tracks user interactions to help you optimize user experience.
Features
Fullstory lets you capture page views, mouse movements, and clicks that visitors make on your site and recreates user sessions by incorporating user data to make it as accurate as possible.
One great feature of FullStory is its integration with Slack. This lets you share user sessions with your team and collaborate on a project seamlessly.
If that’s not good enough for you, FullStory also lets you calculate and track KPIs like conversion rates and visualizes data using dashboards.
Pricing
Fullstory offers a free plan with limited access to three seats and 1,000 sessions per month. Although it doesn’t disclose the pricing information of its paid plans publicly, it offers a 14-day free trial for each of them.
Qualitative user behavior analytics software #3: LogRocket
LogRocket is a behavioral analytics tool that uses session recordings and heatmaps to gather user behavior data.
Features:
Session recording is Logrocket’s key feature. It allows you to combine session replays with network logs, JS errors, and console analysis, making it valuable for bug tracking.
It offers a co-browsing feature that lets you share your screen with the user and walk them through if they are having an issue.
Apart from these, LogRocket offers in-depth user behavior analytics that can help you gain relevant insights to fuel your decision-making.
Pricing
LogRocket offers a free plan that is limited to 1,000 sessions per month and up to a month of data retention. Its paid plan starts at $99 per month with access to a minimum of 10,000 sessions.
Using user behavior analytics data to improve your SaaS growth metrics
User Journey Mapping
A user journey establishes a timeline of a series of user actions to visualize how users interact with your product. It includes all the touchpoints between the user and your product, spanning all the available channels.
You can use user behavior analytics data to map your users’ journeys and identify the right metrics to track. For example, you can improve user onboarding by monitoring the session lengths. If a good number of users continue to bounce during a particular point of the onboarding flow, you can identify what’s going wrong at that point.
You can also map out multiple user journeys by segmenting and creating user personas. This will help you create personalized user journeys instead of using a single broad one for all your users. Additionally, you’ll be able to identify anomalies in the user experience easily. Using user behavior analytics data will make sure the user journeys are as accurate as possible.
In-App Experiences
An experience is a layer that sits on top of your product. It is triggered in real-time and helps engage your users.
Userpilot makes it very easy to create experiences without needing any coding knowledge. With Userpilot, you can leverage a powerful tool to improve user experiences at every stage of the user journey.
Experiences help you improve feature adoption through meaningful real-time actions that make it easier for users to navigate your product.
You can start designing experiences using the Userpilot Chrome Extension builder, compatible with both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browser. You can then start creating powerful & well-designed product experiences, which utilize your user behavior analytics data to make it more contextual for users.
User Interface Improvement
User behavior analytics data can help you identify UI bottlenecks to reduce support ticket volume.
Quantitative user behavior data based on clicks, scrolls, zooms, and navigation fuel user behavior analytics and help you establish user experiences on your product. By monitoring such experiences, you can then identify where the user is facing difficulties to complete the desired action.
Once you’ve identified bottlenecks, you can then improve your UI to create a streamlined user experience for your users.
Product Development Goals
User behavior analytics data can help you be more proactive in reducing churn.
By implementing personalized experiences based on customer segments and patterns, while also watching for friction points, you’ll be able to deliver more value to your customers over time and better retain them too.
Final Thoughts
As you might have realized by now, you have lots of options to choose from when it comes to tracking user behavior and generating relevant insights.
The best way to approach this is by combining tools that use quantitative and qualitative methods. As most of these tools offer free plans, you’ll be able to easily test and see what works best for you!
Want more help in creating better user experiences with all that data? Book a demo with Userpilot!
