Kissmetrics vs. Tableau Server

[Kissmetrics is well suited for the] abandon cart scenario to re-engage users on the purchase journey. Engaging users to personalized content using the visit metrics derived from the data captured at each digital touch points. [Implementing] website campaign and journey orchestration is easy. You get visitor profile to segment upon using different visit metrics and action.

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Whole funnel and specific channel performance from upper to lower funnel metrics. The ability to view full channel performance for some time, such as weekly, monthly, or quarterly, has truly been monumental in how my team optimizes specific channels and campaigns. Daily performance tracking is a bit overwhelming, with load times and having to refresh specific live views over time. It can be challenging to do so at times, as extensive dashboards take much longer to load.

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• The more events you track and properties you send along, the more you can see how specific users use your product/service. The user based timeline gives you a perfect start point to get in touch with users, because you can see where they get stuck.
• Tracking your traffic sources and how they influence conversions is awesome. You can get a perfect view of how much a traffic source contributes to revenue.
• Funnel reports give you more insights into micro and macro conversion steps and give you actionable data to work with.
• Customer support!

• It's good at doing what it is designed for: accessing visualizations without having to download and open a workbook in Tableau Desktop. The latter would be a very inefficient method for sharing our metrics, so I am glad that we have Tableau Server to serve this function.
• Publishing to Tableau Server is quick and easy. Just a few clicks from Tableau Desktop and a few seconds of publishing through an average speed network, and the new visualizations are live!
• Seeing details on who has viewed the visualization and when. This is something particularly useful to me for trying to drive adoption of some new pages, so I really appreciate the granularity provided in Tableau Server

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• Installing.... yes this is also a negative. While you can install and have the program running in minutes, if you use Unbounce, the form tracking process is quite complicated!
• Updates... I feel like the product updates have slowed a lot lately. Thankfully, the product functionality is so amazing that it hasn't impeded the use of it. However, it is still disappointing to see less frequent software updates.
• Occasionally clunky UI... there are a few reports that are really easy to mess up and leave you scratching your head on why it isn't showing you any data.

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• Tableau Server has had some issue handling some of our larger data sets. Our extract refreshes fail intermittently with no obvious error that we can fix
• Tableau Server has been hard to work with before they launched their new Rest API, which is also a little tricky to work with

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Price sensitivity and the different choices that now exist in the Analytics industry. I think it makes sense for us sometime this year to rethink our analytics strategy to see how we may leverage the best of GA (which has included lots of new features and updates the past years_, Kiss and other tools as need be

It simply is used all the time by more and more people. Migrating to something else would involve lots of work and lots of training. The renewal fee being fair, it simply isn't worth migrating to a different tool for now.

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Right after login, you'll get to a dashboard which shows you a quick view on how your business is doing across the events you are tracking. There is no need to dig deeper than that unless you want to, in which case it's very easy to do so just by clicking on the metric on which you want more information. The interface is very intuitive.

Tableau Server takes training and experience in order to unlock the application's full potential. This is best handled by a qualified data scientist or data analytics manager. Tableau user interface layout, nomenclature, and command structure take time and training to become proficient with. Integration and connectivity require proper IT developer support.

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The application was very rarely down; during the period we used the application, I can think of only two or three occasions in which the site was down. Notably, at no time was the the performance of our own site compromised as a result.

Our instance of Tableau Server was hosted on premises (I believe all instances are) so if there were any outages it was normally due to scheduled maintenance on our end. If the Tableau server ever went down, a quick restart solved most issues

Speed improved dramatically as the service matured. Early iterations of the publicly-released application would occasionally provide slow processing of results, but those delays became much rarer occurrences during the last year that we used KISSmetrics. One of the more impressive views (which started out feeling more like a toy) is the live view of visits. Knowing that you could see, in real time, what events a user triggered, was gratifying and instructive.

While there are definitely cases where a user can do things that will make a particular worksheet or dashboard run slowly, overall the performance is extremely fast. The user experience of exploratory analysis particularly shines, there's nothing out there with the polish of Tableau.

Our front-line product support person (Mika) is great. She is responsive and great to work with.

However, the data accuracy issue described earlier is the reason for the low score here. This issue was escalated from front-line to support to level 2 technical support and then it disappeared into a black hole. Escalations, in general, do not go well. We get no response for days, or I have to chase things down. This is not acceptable. Marketing metrics are critically important to me and I need answers quickly. I cannot afford to wait around for days / weeks for a response.

Just to be clear, these comments only apply to escalated support issues.

We have consistently had highly satisfactory results every time we've reached out for help. Our contractor, used for Tableau server maintenance and dashboard development is very technically skilled. When he hits a roadblock on how to do something with Tableau, the support staff have provided timely and useful guidance. He frequently compares it to Cognos and says that while Cognos has capabilities Tableau doesn't, the bottom line value for us is a no-brainer

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Again, we were fortunate to work with KISSmetrics as they built their application, but Hiten, their CEO and founder, was incredibly helpful to me personally, and to our metrics-driven business as a whole, as we adopted their tool.

In our case, they hired a private third party consultant to train our dept. It was extremely boring and felt like it dragged on. Everything I learned was self taught so I was not really paying attention. But I do think that you can easily spend a week on the tool and go over every nook and cranny. We only had the consultant in for a day or two.

I loved this aspect of the product. It wasn't just that the documentation and online tutorials are great - which they are - the on-boarding process though was really stellar. Once you have set everything up, you get a welcome message followed by a step-by-step guide to get you started that is built right into the product interface. For example, the UI asks you to first do X, and then copy this code snippet and send it to your developer who will know what to do with it. When you come back after the first interaction with the product, it continues the process by explaining right in the UI how to track events etc. This kind of step-by-step approach is incredibly efficient. Although there are various forms of supporting documentation (PDFs videos etc) to support every step, you don't really need them. This approach means that you are up and running very quickly with virtually no training time or documentation consultation. Highly efficient process.

The Tableau website is full of videos that you can follow at your own pace. As a very small company with a Tableau install, access to these free resources was incredibly useful to allowing me to implement Tableau to its potential in a reasonable and proportionate manner.

In order to build trackability down to revenue, there was quite a lot of work to integrate Kissmetrics with our software and internal process. We had to build the hooks so that Kissmetrics could call back into our software and billing system, etc.. However, we didn't need additional expertise to do this. Once you understand the API, and you own systems, making it work is not too difficult. We did not require an outside consultant or anything like that

Implementation was over the phone with the vendor, and did not go particularly well. Again, think this was our fault as our integration and IT oversight was poor, and we made errors. Would they have happened had a vendor been onsite? Not sure, probably not, but we probably wouldn't have paid for that either

Kissmetrics is a next-level step up for people who are used to getting their tracking and reporting from Google Analytics or Shopify's CMS. While HubSpot arguably has a better user interface, Kissmetrics certainly has the power and usability necessary to track important conversion data and help you make better marketing decisions.

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Today, if my shop is largely Microsoft-centric, I would be hard pressed to choose a product other than Power BI. Tableau was the visualization leader for years, but Microsoft has caught up with them in many areas, and surpassed them in some. Its ability to source, transform, and model data is superior to Tableau. Tableau still has the lead in some visualizations, but Power BI's rise is evidenced by its ever-increasing position in the leadership section of the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

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• Unfortunately for this client (small business) the cost of Kissmetrics was just too prohibitive. But it's obvious that for a larger company that can afford it, the data would be invaluable to gain more insight in how to gain more active users and orders for a funnel.
• The data provided really increases an understanding of how best to provide the right experience for the users...happy users equals increase in ROI.

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• Tableau does take dedicated FTE to create and analyze the data. It's too complex (and powerful) a product not to have someone dedicated to developing with it.
• There are some significant setup for the server product.
• Once sever setup is complete, it's largely "fire and forget" until an update is necessary. The server update process is cumbersome.

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