Item: Kissmetrics
Rating: 5
Author: Brad Ruderman

Overall Satisfaction with Kissmetrics

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Kissmetrics has been deployed to our whole company. We use it as a self-service analytics tool to calculate metrics around key events that happen within our system. Our advanced analytics are done using a data warehouse. Its an OK analytics tool to complement Google Analytics.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Tracking Event Data.
Debugging Implementation Issues/Verifying the implementation is doing well.
Always adding new features.

Cons

The interface is really cumbersome especially for basic tracking of just specific events over time by property.
Because it's an event driven system there is no way to modify events in the past. For example if you are selling products and returning products there is no easy way to just look at the orders that were not returned.
I wish the data export was more real time then the batch transfer to S3.

Return on Investment

Faster time to answer very simple questions
Allows our business users to see what things are tracking and then ask questions to our data team

Alternatives Considered

Mixpanel, Amplitude Analytics and Heap

I haven't done a vendor comparison in 2 years so It would be challenging to answer this question well. I am grandfathered into great pricing with Kissmetrics, so I have no intentions on switching.

Likelihood to Recommend

1) Do you need an event system or a data warehouse?

2) What specifically are you trying to track and report on?
3) Are you doing anything special on your app (impersonating other users/admin functionalities) that might affect the ability to track users, since Kissmetrics uses cookies?
4) What is the pay-back period for a tool like this? It's hard to calculate but see how many events you are sending and the types of analytics Kissmetrics can do over a data warehouse.

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Engineer + Data Analyst Perspective on Kissmetrics

Software Version