What analytics tools do people use beyond Google Analytics?

October 30th, 2013

Very interested in peoples thoughts on what analytics tools people use beyond Google. Or if you dont. Particularly interested in if people have experiences with MixPanel, or was GA enough and why? We are doing a mobile app so very interested what folks think of the analytic tools and the whys and the costs

Danny Freeman Founder at Joto

October 30th, 2013

Piwik. Its free, has hundreds of features, is near-infinitely customizable, open source, respectful of user privacy, and they have libraries for mobile apps to integrate natively.

Lee Guertin Editorial Research Manager, Online Analytics

October 30th, 2013

FYI - Every major analytics tool that supports mobile app integration will/ should have the same. Beware small tools with little support if your team doesn't have experience with analytics, unless your developers have a lot of confidence. I wouldn't recommend GA here because of the data collection methods used, etc. the "free" version is also rather limited in scope. They want people to upgrade to GA Premium. You may also find restrictions based on the platform type. Apple, for example, has release requirements and a review process that you must pass, so be aware of additional code you add or need to update frequently. Also be aware of platform/OS compatibility when looking at tools, etc. Sent from my iPhone

Matt Tharp VP of Product Mgmt at Zaius, Inc.

October 30th, 2013

It's always good to use something in addition to Google Analytics, but depends on what you want to accomplish and how much traffic you have. Products like Kissmetrics, Mixpanel, Woopra, and others provide the ability to drill into single user behaviors/actions, rather than just the broad aggregate like in GA. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }

Woopra looks great, but candidly I haven't used it for daily analytics.

What analysis are you interested in doing beyond what's available in GA?

Robert Faibish Mixpanel

October 30th, 2013

Most people think that MixPanel is the best analytics tool to use. It's pricy as well...but 95% of the people who I have spoken with who use it say it is worth it. You can start using it for free via their startup package if you want to just test it out.

Mark Schinkel

October 30th, 2013

Wistia for video

Leadlander to see what companies are looking at your site

Barron Caster Product at Rev.com

October 30th, 2013

If you're interested in looking at other website's traffic and metrics, these sites are helpful:

Compete.com

Quantcast.com

Alexa.com

Gaurav Sharma

October 31st, 2013

Surprised no one mentioned Flurry. It isn't too fancy (no realtime), but does a good basic analytics job and is free. TestFlight is working on their's too. https://testflightapp.com/flightpath/

Vishal Kumar

October 30th, 2013

Kissmetrics is making waves right now. It is pricy. But it is pretty good.

Lee Guertin Editorial Research Manager, Online Analytics

October 30th, 2013

Depends. Are you restricting the tools to those that are "free" or including paid services? And are you interested in sampled results for generalized trends or actual counting of events and interactions? From a mobile app perspective, I would guess you might be interested in explicit application events and network request data. Some things may be in-app only and others may include online communications. Look at the number and complexity of your app interactions, types of users and user participation, and at the expected detail level of your success metrics and start from there. Event logs themselves may give you the immediate testing value you seek. I haven't seen anyone in big industry use MixPanel. Honestly, this would likely be a much better discussion for a web analytics or digital analytics forum... Not so much for this one. Hope this helps! Sent from my iPhone

Chaminda Wijetilleke COO at EquityEats

October 31st, 2013

@Matt, thanks for your feedback. I have the same impression that GA does more aggregate vs indvidual. I am really interested on actions and their effect on particular segments, so i can then optimize ad spend and/or acq sources. Frankly, even determining what are interesting segments to begin with would be very interesting as well. I guess what was interesting for me about Mixpanel, was the ease of use of the product. I think that might be a high variable, given right now i might be having a data hat as well as many other hats.

@LeeAnn, great feedback and great questions. I am not exclusive to free products and certainly would pay for a good data product, but hell free/freemium can be good. As far as as your second question, I am kinda of biased towards actual data, as that tends to give a better signal to investors, and also since I want us to have a data-oriented culture, i think that might be better. Do you have thoughts?

Question stats