Start with Google Analytics - add KISSmetrics later.
February 14, 2013

Start with Google Analytics - add KISSmetrics later.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Large (1 million events / month)

Overall Satisfaction

Pros

  • Product Decision Making: Allowed us to do a/b test and verify specific decisions.
  • Customer Searching or Tracking: Allowed us easily filter through all our users and pin-point one user to analyze.
  • Customer Performance: Enabled us to see if a specific customer was able to complete certain tasks in an expected timeframe.
  • Data import of events previous events: We uploaded lots of data to help us analyze it further.
  • Viewing the Customer Funnels: Gave us the opportunity to see the paths of our customers.

Cons

  • Demographic Analysis of the customers: It doesn't provide comprehensive demographic analysis of our users (age, sex, etc.,).
  • RealTime means 30mins but it's still pretty responsive: Takes awhile until the data and graphs show the most updated data.
  • Comprehensive API but for the barebones it does a good job: For anyone that needs advanced customization, it will most likely require lots of customer support since their API is barebones.
  • Reviewing the exact events a user goes through allows us to save time understanding specific customer issues and bug reports. i.e., we can see the steps they took and mimic the behaviours.
  • A/B testing allows us to toggle specific product decisions and ad campaigns.
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.
Start off with Google Analytics and then over time if budget and further learning is allowed build out KISSmetrics.

Start off with the basics. GA will give all the core basics. Over time when GA becomes too vague and you want to follow people versus just a number... upgrade to KISS or Mixpanel. Depending on your budget, go with Mixpanel since it's free up to some x number of events. KISSmetrics however will charge you up front after 14 days.

Product Usage

2 - For a startup... Engineering, Product and general learning/curiousity. But I can see this apply to the Business Intelligence team, marketing etc.,
3 - Engineers
  • Understanding our users
  • Understanding behaviors of a specific user
  • See realtime (give or take 30min-a few hours) what the users are doing
  • Tracking performance of specific events

Evaluation and Selection

We didn't really switch from anything. We just wanted another analytics platform to augment information about the behaviors of ours users, product etc.,
Mixpanel, Google Analytics. When we were making the decision, KISSMetrics was more mature and they had comprehensive documentation that allowed us to quickly pick out features we needed. I think we really wanted a way to import our data and the time it didn't seem like Mixpanel could do that. At the end of the day, we decided to go with KISSmetrics and Google Analytics (free).

Implementation

The implementation is not really the issue. It's really just trying to understand what you want to track about your users.
  • Implemented in-house

Training

  • Self-taught
Yeah it was easy. Still required some additional reading and testing out.

Configuration

Like any framework (we use yii) you have to customize it accordingly.

Support

No - The online documentation and us fiddling around with the tool was good enough. Granted we did have issues originally with the data import. We contacted the support during our free trial and they were responsive within 2 days.

Usability

Integration like any analytics platform is always the hardest. Using the their dashboard and understanding our users was pretty simple.

Reliability

It hasn't gone down on us yet. The trick with analytics tools is that it's usually the developer that doesn't tag the events correctly.
No issues.

Integration

  • We would have integrated with Salesforce which KISSmetrics supports
  • Since we are using Sugar CRM it would have required some time for us to integrate this. We expect to do this in the near future. We don't see any issues to integration, it's just not right out of the box by KISS and other tools. So it's going to have to be an investment on our end.
They support SalesForce

Vendor Relationship

Great!
No real terms to negotiate since it was already tiered.

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