An excellent service for measuring KPIs, but with a learning curve
Rating: 7 out of 10
February 05, 2016
Vetted Review
Verified User
2 years of experience
We use Kissmetrics to track our marketing and sales funnels as well as to track user activities within our SasS. Kissmetrics touches all departments in the company, from development to customer service to (of course) marketing. The main problem Kissmetrics addresses involves KPIs across the board: How many new users do we have between X and Y dates? When did X user do the following activity? How impactful was X email?
Kissmetric's addition of the click-to-track feature makes it incredibly easy to specify events and actions to be tracked from any site you have your KM javascript installed on. Tracking user actions that way combined with the URL API makes it super easy to create cohort, path, and funnel reports for aggregate reporting, and if you've got it set up to alias the auto-generated UID to an identity (e.g. a username or an email address in your system), it's easier than ever to track specific user actions and drill down to the most important thing you want to know— what makes people buy? What makes people stay?
Kissmetric's addition of the click-to-track feature makes it incredibly easy to specify events and actions to be tracked from any site you have your KM javascript installed on. Tracking user actions that way combined with the URL API makes it super easy to create cohort, path, and funnel reports for aggregate reporting, and if you've got it set up to alias the auto-generated UID to an identity (e.g. a username or an email address in your system), it's easier than ever to track specific user actions and drill down to the most important thing you want to know— what makes people buy? What makes people stay?
- The URL API, when combined with reports and people search, is very powerful. It allows you to create and track a virtually unlimited number of cohorts using property and event tracking.
- Live view is fantastic for a bird's eye view of what's going on with your users in real-time. We use this often to test our funnels and make sure things are indeed tracking, and that it's set up in a way that is actually helpful to us.
- Kissmetrics support is bar none– they're friendly and speak in terms that even the most novice of users can follow.
- Click-to-track makes it virtually fool-proof to specify events and actions to track, without having to figure out any complicated coding.
Cons
- In-app reports are often not quite "enough" as is. Kissmetrics lacks secondary/tertiary sort of filter functions that let the user distill the collected information in a useful way on-screen. What we sometimes have to do is export reports and use functions within Excel to get the data view that is useful for us.
- We've gotten some conflicting advice about whether or not the ideal identity to use is an email address or some other unique identifier, and that has made implementation/reporting more confusing.
- Kissmetrics does not track or provide demographic or location data by default.
- It's certainly not an inexpensive service, so it may be cost prohibitive for smaller, bootstrapped startups to get started with it.