Product analytics enables you to turn your consumers’ experiences into a differentiation for your product. Consider the apps Calm, Peloton, and Netflix. They all work in a competitive industry, yet their user experience sets them apart. According to analytics trends, even marketers must embrace the digital experience as a primary value generator nowadays. And it is with the assistance of product analytics tools that you will find how to improve the experience.
In today’s article, we’ll assist you in selecting the right tool for you.
Product analytics tools observe user interactions to assist product and marketing teams in better understanding user behavior, detecting problems, and making more informed product change decisions.
All product analytics tools capture user interactions, commonly referred to as “events,” and provide a range of ways to analyze them in order to learn about user behavior. However, they handle data collection in a variety of ways. Some tools require you to define what data you want to collect in advance, while others collect everything and allow you to choose what to examine later.
Why Is a Product Analytics Tool Necessary?
The most dependable and unbiased way to gather feedback on digital products is by using a Product Analytic Tool. Consumer satisfaction frequently leads to a loyal customer base for any firm. The usage of product analytics tools provides information on whether or not customers are satisfied. These tools are mostly used for the following purposes:
- Product Engagement: It indicates how frequently people use a given element of your product or how much time they spend with it.
- User Behavior – It tracks and collects data on user behavior, such as how consumers use the product, which features they spend the most time on, and so on.
- Product Performance – It indicates which characteristics of the product are attracting more clients and which are repelling traffic.
- Comparative Analysis – It delivers visual dashboards and analytics reports, making data analysis easy.
Benefits of Product Analytics Tools
Product Analytics Tools are a worthwhile investment in terms of both money and value. These tools offer numerous advantages, including –
- Awareness of your product’s performance based on verifiable statistics and analytics.
- Insights regarding the frequency of client visits as well as their interactions with certain product features.
- Comparable data on the product’s many features provide a foundation for SWOT analysis.
- Segmented analysis based on numerous parameters such as geographical location, age, and user behavioral habits.
- Identification of user pain points or the point at which customers become stuck and the firm loses customers.
Best Product Analytics Tools In 2023
Here are the top product analytics tools, which include a high-level overview of each product, pricing, and user review data.
#1. Amplitude Analytics
- G2 Rating: 4.5 stars
- Prices begin at $900 per month.
Amplitude is a digital analytics platform that provides product teams with tools for measuring and evaluating their apps. The tool predicts what actions your consumers will take, minimizes conversion process friction, provides visibility into your user journey and experience, and uses analytics to help your product produce better products.
Amplitude requires engineering assistance to build the analytics tool and change any tracking or event fields that you’ll need.
#2. Mixpanel
- G2 Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
- Price: Free plan is limited; the premium tier begins at $25 per month.
Mixpanel is a product analytics platform that collects usage data from your product’s touchpoints and helps you learn how your customers engage with your web properties, where and why people churn, and how to optimize your product experience to increase retention and conversion.
The tool allows you to split users into cohorts, track drop-off rates to see where your clients are having difficulty, and integrate your databases with a few clicks. Mixpanel requires developer and engineering assistance to build the platform and update any tracking or event fields that are required.
#3. Google Analytics
- G2 Rating: 4.5 stars
- Price: There is a limited free tier; the paid tier begins at $150,000 per year.
Google Analytics assists marketers in tracking impressions, measuring ROI on sponsored initiatives, and determining the primary traffic channels so that marketing and growth resources may be allocated appropriately. For tracking data on websites, online apps, and e-commerce stores, Google Analytics is the finest option.
Google Analytics will provide you with the following information: the number of user sessions, the pages visited by users each session, the average stay length, bounce rates, and so on — so you can have a basic idea of what to improve with your content and marketing.
However, for all that it offers, Google Analytics is highly limited when it comes to product experience use cases, and you will not be able to segment people, study how they use your product, and determine why they are converting or churning.
#4. Heap
- G2 Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars
- Price: Free tier is limited; the premium tier begins at $3,600 per year.
Heap assists businesses looking to track their customers’ journeys, assess product uptake, and watch user behavior in order to drive product-led growth. The tool automatically collects behavioral and event data from your users and clients, including everything from clicks and scrolls to what they’re interacting with and more.
However, Heap can be difficult to set up unless you have a technical background, especially for marketers and business users who prefer a no-code, drag-and-drop platform.
#5. Pendo
Pendo is a product analytics platform that uses in-app assistance and powerful product analytics to help developers, product engineers, and marketers create experiences that people want to embrace. You can use Pendo to: create and recommend useful content on the fly.
Simple nudges and hints can help people get started.
Surveys and polls can be used to gather feedback.
Throughout your user experience, collect data on user involvement.
Pendo, like Heap, is not a plug-and-play analytics tool, and you may need some technical effort to get it to function or make changes to some of your walkthrough phases.
Price: Limited free tier; complex usage-based pricing
#6. FullStory
- G2 Review Rating: 4.5
- Price: $199 per month with a free starter plan
FullStory is a digital experience platform that allows you to capture user experiences at scale. You can record individual sessions, build user engagement heatmaps, classify users into buckets, and analyze user behavior for annoyance signals like rage-clicking and pinch-to-zoom using FullStory.
FullStory’s price is unclear, and your billing tends to increase as you upgrade or outgrow your current plan.
#7. UXCam
- G2 Review Score: 4.7
- Price: There is a limited free tier; please contact us for pricing.
UXCam observes user behavior within your web and mobile applications through recorded sessions, heatmaps, and issue tracking, which alerts you when something goes wrong with your app.
It is an older platform that isn’t as user-friendly as you may anticipate. UXCam’s pricing structure is also complicated, with a generous free tier that suddenly increases to $3k/year if your credits are used.
Users of UXCam also complain that the site is unreliable, with recorded sessions often disappearing from their accounts.
#8. Glassbox
- G2 Review Score: 4.8
- Price: There is a limited free tier; please contact us for pricing.
Glassbox is a customer experience platform that assists engineers and marketers in removing friction, increasing engagement, recording crashes, bugs, and complaints, and tracking the product experience metrics that count.
The tool is slow, recorded sessions frequently break, and if you’re a non-technical user, you may face a steep learning curve mastering Glassbox’s terminology.
#9. LogRocket
- G2 Review Rating: 4.7
- Price: Free tier is limited; the premium tier begins at $99 per month.
LogRocket is a frontend monitoring and session replay platform for development teams developing web and mobile applications.
It tracks user sessions analyze your front end for faults, network outages, and performance issues, and displays click maps and heatmaps to show how users interact with your apps.
Recorded sessions take a long time to render, and access to LogRocket’s key tools like heatmaps, filtering, and path analysis costs roughly $6k per year. LogRocket charges based on consumption, and if your application users check in numerous times per day, you will quickly exhaust your plan and need to upgrade to a custom (and probably more expensive) plan.
#10. Smartlook
- G2 Review Rating: 4.6
- Price: Free tier is limited; the premium tier begins at $39 per month.
Smartlook is a behavioral analytics tool that assists product engineers and marketers in replaying user sessions, tracking action completions, filtering sessions by events, and determining which of your on-page features people interact with the most, where they drop off the funnel, and why.
It is one of the more cost-effective choices available, albeit their free tier is designed to pressure you until you upgrade.
#11. Mouseflow
- G2 Review Rating: 4.6
- Price: Free tier is extremely limited; premium tiers begin at $24 per month.
Mouseflow is a platform for behavioral analytics geared toward marketers, product teams, and UX engineers. The tool records and analyzes user behavior using heatmaps, session recordings, and feedback forms, as well as funnel analytics, drop-off monitoring, and user friction measurements.
Other Product Analytics Tools
Here are a few more that didn’t make the cut.
- Productboard – Best for stakeholder roadmaps
- Monday.com – Best for product analytics as part of a comprehensive project management platform
- Salesforce Service Cloud – The best option for a comprehensive cloud-based solution.
- FullStory – Excellent for mixing qualitative and quantitative data in real time.
- Plerdy – Ideal for creating detailed heat maps of user activity.
- Prodoscore – Excellent for determining daily productivity.
- Reviewbox – The best e-commerce management software
- Indicative – Ideal for connecting to your data warehouse directly.
- Bitclu – The best option for Amazon sellers
Key Features of Product Analytics Tools
The best product analytics tools will often have the following features:
- Tracking: following users and monitoring their actions on your website or app.
- Segmentation: This is the process of determining who users are, where they came from, and what they are interested in.
- Profiles: allow you to create user groupings based on specific characteristics.
- Notifications: used to notify product teams of significant events or trends.
- A/B Testing: comparing different versions of features to determine which works best.
- Dashboards: tools for visualizing data in the most useful and illuminating manner.
- Tools for measuring how users interact with each feature
Is It Possible to Find Free Product Analytics Tools?
There are numerous free product analytics tools available on the market that may be appropriate for small product development teams on a tight budget. Google Analytics, Quantcast Measure, Piwik, and Similar Web are just a few of the apps that offer free plans. They may not have as many features as paid tools, but they can provide a wealth of useful information.
What Are Product Metrics?
Product metrics are quantifiable data points that allow development teams to analyze and measure the success of a particular product. Core metrics may include free-to-paid conversion rate, customer churn, and monthly recurring revenue. A good understanding of these metrics is essential for good product management—helping to improve the product and increase sales.
Types of Product Analytics Tools
Tools for product analytics come in different forms. Some just offer analytics, while others also provide related toolsets to, for example, capture customer feedback.
There’s also a difference between qualitative and quantitative product analytics tools. Qualitative analytics tools concern themselves with user behavior, whereas quantitative analytics tools focus on numerical data.
The technology used for web and mobile products isn’t the same, which is why it makes sense to have separate tools for each. A one-size-fits-all product analytics tool is likely to lack features or capabilities. You want to get specific and go for specialized tools too.
You can also try building your own product analytics tool in-house. This comes with additional development costs and a certain level of risk. We recommend a cost-benefit analysis here.
Conclusion
Effectively implementing a product analytics tool requires comprehensive research and clarity of the objectives you want to achieve. A clear understanding of the requirements and benefits of each one of these tools will help you in your further research.
We hope this guide proves useful in searching for the best solution for you.
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