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Brilliant concept. Not sure I trust data.
December 18, 2012

Brilliant concept. Not sure I trust data.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review

Overall Satisfaction

  • KISSmetrics is a brilliant concept, and when it works, it works really well. I love the data granularity that it generates, and it's really good at funnel analysis (measuring site visitor progression through a specific flow). It's also great for enabling the firing of events based on specific interactions.
  • The biggest issue, is that I have lost faith in the accuracy of the data.
  • There have been a few examples of the system producing what looks like spurious data. I triangulate the data using Google Analytics, and on a few occasions, there have been very wide discrepancies that indicate a potentially serious problem. For example, Google might indicate 1,000 page views, while KISSmetrics indicates 5,000.. This is not a constant problem, but it has happened enough where my faith in the data is shaken.
  • It really doesn't matter how good the front-end functionality is if my faith in data accuracy is not 100%.
  • A/B testing is much more difficult than it needs to be. It is possible to structure the product to enable A/B testing, but this involves reading a bunch of help files and writing some code. I would have expected this to work out-of-the-box. In Google Analytics, for example.you only have to enter two URLs and then it works. This was a surprise.
  • Assuming that the data is accurate, I would say that the ROI is pretty high. All my funnel reporting and KPI reporting is done in KISSmetrics and these are the metrics I report back to our investors. It was essentially, the main reporting tool for our company. However, due to the data validity issues already described, I have really switched back to Google Analytics as the primary tool and use KISSmetrics as the secondary.
Despite the fact that I have had some issues, I will probably renew. At the price point, it's still worth having the tool in my arsenal.
The product is conceptually brilliant, but there are some definite rough spots. As noted, second level support and the visual design elements are the two biggest ones.

Product Usage

4 - The executive team: CEO, CSO, CTO, and our Marketing Executive. This is half the company.
2 - CEO and CTO.
  • We use the tool for marketing analysis. As a venture-backed young company, marketing metrics are critically important to us. We track: conversion rates, customer usage (where people go on the site; what are the most popular features; what do people like, etc).

Evaluation and Selection

We didn't switch to KISSmetrics from anything else. But we continue to use other tools like Google Analytics in parallel.
We looked at Chartbeat, Mouseflow, and some others.

We chose KISSmetrics because of the ability to track individual interactions. We can see individual user journeys, and fire events based on user interactions (like filling in a form, reading content, etc.).

Mouseflow is a slightly different kind of tool that tracks interactions in a quantitative rather than qualitative manner.

Implementation

We did most of the setup ourselves, with some help from the vendor around tagging events and getting events to fire according to specific rules.

Making this work properly was not entirely simple, and did require some custom code.
  • Vendor implemented
  • Implemented in-house

Training

  • Online training
We didn't get any formal training, but the product help files and the training videos are very good.

Configuration

Custom code was mainly around event triggering.

Support

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.
No - This is not offered.

Usability

Funnel analytics reporting is generally quite good. The drag-and-drop functionality is great and it's easy to use. I would rate this a 7 or so. The problem is the home page or dashboard. This consists of a bunch of boxes with numbers in them and is very weak on visual design. It's quite confusing to look at and doesn't give an instant visual picture as to what is happening. It seems as though this was not given very much thought by the team. The Google Analytics dashboard is very much stronger in terms of visual design.

Reliability

No uptime issues
No performance issues.

Integration

  • We have integrated with a payment processor called Recurly.
This is a new integration offered by KISSmetrics and it is a bit of a mixed bag. The problem for us is that our payments are recurring subscription payments, not one-time purchases. The integration does not support recurring payments and hence all the exciting stuff they talk about like revenue tracking, churn measurement, calculation of customer lifetime value etc. do not work for us. This is a major flaw.
  • No.

Vendor Relationship

Generally speaking the vendor is very easy to deal with and they are quite responsive and helpful. But because of the second-level support issues described earlier, I could not rate them more than 6 out of 10.
No. Product is inexpensive and not worth haggling over.