As a small business owner or entrepreneur, you may have experienced the feeling that you’re throwing things at a wall to see what sticks. If you’re at the start of your startup journey, then we have something in common. I have used numerous web analytics tools over the years. I wanted to share with you some great web analytics tools for any startup company looking to grow their website traffic and sales.
Data leads to the best decisions, and that’s why startups should know where to turn to for monitoring analytics. Google Analytics is one of the most popular tracking tools out there, but it isn’t the only one. You need to carefully consider what data you want to get and how often you should measure it, as well as how easy it is for you to implement tracking codes and optimize your site for conversions. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of web analytics tools for startups that go beyond just Google Analytics in terms of available metrics, giving you the option to see and analyze what truly matters for your business!
Google Analytics
Google analytics lets you measure, analyse, and optimise user acquisition and engagement with your website and mobile application. This is a perfect analytics tool to understand the customer journey on your website or app.
It lets you to:
- Understand the number of users, their characteristics, and where they come from.
- Measure what actions the users are taking on your app or website.
- Measure in-app payments and revenue (boon for ecommerce stores).
- Customize reports specific to your business.
- Understand different user groups’ behaviour by slicing and dicing the date.
- Leverage Google Analytics data in other Google products.
Use Google Analytics data with other Google Tools like webmaster tools and Adwords to create better-targeted ads and more detailed marketing campaigns.Try Google Analytics
Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics lets you understand your customers better than any other analytics tool. The tool helps you track, analyse, and optimise your digital marketing performance with the help of its behavioural analytics tools.
It monitors every user’s activity on your website and creates his user profile (when he signed up, which features he uses, which campaign attracts him, and how much money he’s spending, etc.) to provide you answers to questions like:
- Where do people drop off in your funnel?
- Which channels brings most revenue?
- How segment behaviour changes over time?
The price for these tools starts at $500 per month.Try Kissmetrics
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is among the most sought-after analytics tools when it comes to recording users behaviour on the website. The tool provides you with visual reports and individual session recordings to help you understand your users better – where they’re coming from, where they’re navigating to, and where they’re getting stuck.
The visual reports come in the form of heatmaps and confetti reports. With these reports you can see what’s hot on your website and what’s not.
Crazy Egg also provides you with A/B split testing option to get the best result. You can also use the inbuilt editing tools which lets you change or modify content on your website without the need for a developer.Try Crazy Egg
Chartio
Chartio is a cloud based analytics tool which lets you to explore, visualize and combine data from business applications to database.
This analytics solution lets you connect to almost all your databases like Amazon Redshift, Google Analytics, MySQL, etc. securely in minutes and lets you build beautiful dashboards and visualisations and share them across the organisation via scheduled emails or reports.Try Chartio
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Appsee
Appsee offers a new approach to real-time mobile app analytics that puts you into your users shoes. The tool automatically tracks every screen, action, and gesture performed by your users, and lets you watch videos of real user sessions so you can see exactly which problems they’re experiencing.
The tool also aggregates the collected data into simple visual reports (touch heatmaps, and user navigation paths) for you to see which actions users perform in each and every screen and how you can optimize your conversion funnel.
Appsee automatically shows you the problems in your application including crashed sessions and suggests how to fix them.
This analytics tool is integrated using a single line of code and has no performance impact on your application.
Appsee comes with a free plan which can be used on your beta version of the application (1 app with 2,500 monthly sessions). You can also opt for its premium plan or the enterprise plan depending on your monthly sessions and other requirements.Try Appsee
Appsflyer
Appsflyer is a leading mobile attribution and analytics solution which lets you attribute every install and visit to the respective marketing campaign which acted as the trigger. The company has over 1500 integrated media partners including WyWy, Shazam, etc. which lets you easily track which campaign led to the app install and which successfully re-engaged your users.
Appsflyer is also a Facebook Mobile Measurement Partner, Google Official Partner, and Twitter Official Partner and provides you with unbiased attribution, mobile campaign analytics, in-app user engagement tracking, lifetime value analysis, ROI and retargeting attribution.
If you’re an app developer who needs analytics and attribution solutions for your advertisements and marketing campaigns, Appsflyer will suit you best.Try Appsflyer
Hotjar
Heatmaps, session recordings, conversion funnels, form analysis, feedback polls, feedback messages, surveys, and recruiting users for testing features; Hotjar provides you an all in one solution by combining the analytics with user feedback. If you’re looking for a visual analytics solution for your website, Hotjar should be your first priority.
This analytics tool records the entire user journey on your website and lets you see yourself which is working and which isn’t. Even if you’re unable to decide the cause, it also provides you with tools to ask the users the same question.
Hotjar provides you with free 200 recordings, which can be enough if you’re just starting up. But you can also opt for the premium plans which provides you with even more recordings and features.Try Hotjar
Mixpanel
Mixpanel is an event-driven analytical tool which tracks people actions rather than page views. It is a 360-degree analytics solutions to help you build and market your web and mobile product. The tool evaluates 67 billion actions and presents the data to the users in a clear easy-to-understand format. It is an event centric analytic program where you don’t record the user pageviews and clicks. It is a platform which tracks events.
9. Hotjar
Are you looking for a visual analytics tool for your website? Then Hotjar is what you need. Hotjar, one of the 10 best analytics tools for startups, is an all-in-one solution for your website: session recordings, heatmaps, form analysis, conversion funnels, feedback polls, surveys, feedback messages, and recruiting users to test out the features.
Reasons why Hotjar is one of the 10 best analytics tools for startups:
- It allows you to record the user journey on your website and allows you to see which campaign works fine.
- It has about 200 free recordings, which is useful for a startup.
- If you cant decide or gets stuck on a cause, Hotjar provides tools to ask your users.
10. Mixpanel
Mixpanel, one of the 10 best analytics tools for startups, is an event-driven analytical tool. It helps track people’s actions rather than the page views. It allows you to create and market your web and mobile products. The data is presented to the users in a clear and easy-to-understand format. It tracks events and doesn’t record the user page views or clicks.
Reasons why Mixpanel is one of the 10 best analytics tools for startups:
- Mixpanel is easy to set up.
- The reports from Mixpanel are easy to study.
- You can visualize your reports in different ways.
- It gives engagement data of users. Their full history with the app can be viewed.
These are some of the 10 best analytics tools for startups. Hope this article proved helpful to you in some way.
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Conclusion
It may not be obvious to startups, but the most important ingredient for building a successful company is getting the right data. While there are tons of analytics platforms out there, such as Google Analytics and Mixpanel, it can be overwhelming for startups to choose one. As a web analytics expert at Acquisio and founder of StartupsDataTools (S3), here I’ll introduce you 28 web analytics tools that I recommend for startups. Regardless of your business challenge or focus area (product usage, retention, funnel analysis, lead generation, financial performance…etc), these tools will give you all the data you could ever need to answer your questions and make better decisions going forward.
Startups are in a constant race to be able to refine and repeat their product development cycle but at the same time, cannot afford the time, or money. This leads most startups right into the arms of a web analytics tool. Whether it’s Mint, Google Analytics or some other platform, tools that enable startups to track key metrics about their website enable them to make informed decisions about their product and business growth.