Stellar product!
February 28, 2013

Stellar product!

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

Overall Satisfaction

  • Kissmetrics has a fantastic dashboard where you can see all relevant metrics immediately after login.
  • Kissmetrics was extremely easy to implement in our site and it works across different platforms.
  • After the initial setup, managing and creating new events to track is super simple.
  • You can monitor live usage. This feature allows you to monitor user interactions as they are happening and as events you are tracking are triggered. You can see exactly what users are doing real time, which is really a very cool feature. At the time, this kind of realtime monitoring was not possible with Google Analytics.
  • Live usage UI can be improved a lot. although this was definitely a very cool feature, it was somewhat marred by a poor and confusing UI. It shows a stream of actions events being triggered, but it's a bit difficult to figure out how to actually use this stream of data. For example, it;s very difficult to follow a single user. This feature needs a much more intuitive visual design for it to be truly useful as well as just cool.
  • We are a media property that depends on advertising, our ROI is directly linked to engagement, which is improved thanks to the analytics tools we use with Kissmetrics.
We are constantly improving our products and I see Kissmetrics as our most elemental system to gain quick and constant customer feedback through engagement metrics we follow every day
Kissmetrics is a very good and simple tracking and reporting system. I think that all web properties should have it installed in order to be able to track what's important. You can still have google analytics in conjunction with KISSmetrics and get good insights from that product, but the simplicity and ease-of-use offered by Kissmetrics makes it a no-brainer.

Product Usage

3 - Product Development and Management
1 - One developer is in charge of setting up the events in the system and in our platform.
  • We use kissmetrics to improve our product by tracking how users engage with our app, what features they use the most

Evaluation and Selection

Google Analytics
Mixpanel.

KISSmetrics has higher brand awareness than Mixpanel and I was certainly more familiar with it. However, I signed up for the free trial version of both KISSmetrics and Mixpanel with a view to comparing. Both vendors sent me technical instructions for set-up. I sent these documents to our technical lead and he came back and said that he intended to deploy them both, but that he had, in fact, already deployed KISSmetrics. I was pretty surprised that he had been able to get it up and running in under an hour. I immediately went in and took a look. My first response was that I loved the User Interface. I played around with it a bit, and based on that experience (and the fact that the price was right) decided that we would go with it. I never even really looked at Mixpanel.

Implementation

This is a self-service product, so procurement and billing are extremely simple. The system is also pay-as-you-go, so there are no surprises when, for example, you exceed the number of allowed transactions and the system is inaccessible. until you pay more. Setup was extremely easy and the whole process was hassle-free.

Training

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.

Configuration

Kissmetrics tracks events and you need to setup each event separately in order to track them properly.

Support

I have only used support a couple of times, and this was not really because of any problems with the product, but was more to answer "how-to" type questions. For example, I needed some clarification on how to turn on a particular feature or how to do something specific.

The system for accessing support was to fill in a web form. This is often a very frustrating experience with other vendors as the lack of human interaction can make things very slow and iterative. In this case, however, it worked really well. We got a response to our tickets in under an hour and the responses were of very high quality.

Usability

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.

Reliability

In a year, we had trouble logging-in just once. But even then all tracking data was later available once the site came back up. also, the system down notices were very informative - they explained the reason for the downtime and were constantly updated with progress in getting the problem resolved.
Very fast. No issues here.

Integration

  • No
I don't know if there are any integrations available nor needed.

Vendor Relationship

Signup is self-service, for additional features (unlimited cohort analysis reports) I needed to contact sale which was taken care via email and it was very straightforward.