The right tracking infrastructure for your product is essential to success
It’s 2020 and to say it’s been a crazy year is a massive understatement. Business models and revenue numbers have taken a nose-dive and leaders across the world are trying to just do enough to survive. In these trying times, it is absolutely crucial to measure conversion funnels effectively and methodically. Automating and optimizing your conversion funnel can be the most impactful and important medium effort task to achieve.
With the above in mind, let’s take a look at some common product and marketing analytics tools that help optimize conversion funnels. Every marketing campaign starts with an attribution analytics platform, and some of the common ones are:
- Google Analytics—Nothing beats Google Analytics when it comes to attribution. Google Analytics can track the channels where your users come from, for example Email, Organic Search, Referral, Social, etc. which helps you know the channel that is working.
- Appsflyer—Appsflyer is a very popular attribution tool used primarily to track and attribute mobile installs. If you have a mobile app, Appsflyer can be very handy to analyze the top of the funnel for your user acquisition.
- Branch—Branch helps you connect touchpoints from multiple channels like Search, Ads, Email, Social, Browser, Referrals so you can view all your attribution data in one platform.
While attribution helps tremendously with the initial part of understanding your users, the next step is to measure how users use your product with product analytics tools. There are a variety of product analytics tools that help one measure various engagement across funnels in the product. Some of the most popular product analytics tools include:
- Mixpanel—Mixpanel is the most popular platform for tracking user events in your product. Mixpanel helps you create funnels for various flows in your product, and analyze user events and patterns pertaining to those flows. Moreover, Mixpanel also helps you engage users with thoughtful automated notifications and emails when they are inactive or have low engagement on the platform.
- Amplitude—Amplitude is an alternative to Mixpanel and has interesting persona-based flows. Amplitude clusters users into cohorts based on personas and this helps one get an overarching perspective on user activity.
- Heap—Heap is a lot easier to integrate as compared to other platforms since it doesn’t require events to be passed manually and you don’t need to decide in advance what to track.
- Hotjar—Hotjar is a very different way to track user flows across your product. Hotjar takes a quantitative and qualitative approach to user tracking. Hotjar records videos of users navigating your product so you can see exactly how users are interacting with your product and where they’re getting stuck.
Ideally, try to avoid using too many tracking tools because they tend to increase your website load-times make it infuriating for users. Also, some of these tools tend to be very expensive—so, if you are a startup founder just getting started, make sure to check out their Startup Plans (reach out to them directly if you don't see one on their website).
About the author:
Dhruv Bhatia is the founder of Neo. Neo helps distributed teams collaborate more effectively with regular check-ins and asynchronous updates.