An excellent service for measuring KPIs, but with a learning curve
Updated February 05, 2016
An excellent service for measuring KPIs, but with a learning curve
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Medium
Modules Used
- Analyze
Overall Satisfaction with Kissmetrics
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.
- 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.
- Positive: Better customer service! We use Kissmetrics to track user actions within our app, and that allows our CS team to troubleshoot and resolve customer inquiries and problems more quickly and efficiently.
- Tracking marketing funnels through Kissmetrics lets us find out what works and what doesn't— fast. That way we can concentrate on improving the processes that make us money and dumping the ones that don't.
- The only negative impact is that because some reporting isn't as customizable or robust in-app as would be useful for us, it sometimes takes us longer to glean the right information we need to measure the effectiveness of our campaigns.
- Google Analytics, liveorange and Mixpanel
Kissmetrics and Google Analytics both have their strengths and weaknesses, but for individual user and advanced campaign tracking, Kissmetrics wins. As complicated as Kissmetrics can be (depending on how advanced you want to get with it), it's still significantly easier to set up and read reports related to user funnels in Kissmetrics. Google Analytics has built-in demographics and location info, but individual user tracking leaves much to be desired. Just setting up Google Analytics requires a crash course in how to use the service, which isn't ideal for many companies who don't necessarily employ someone solely for their experience using Google Analytics, but rather their entire set of marketing skills.
LiveOrange and Mixpanel are two additional competitors, but with my limited experience of them, I'm unable to go into detail about the pros and cons of those services versus Kissmetrics.
LiveOrange and Mixpanel are two additional competitors, but with my limited experience of them, I'm unable to go into detail about the pros and cons of those services versus Kissmetrics.
Using Kissmetrics
10 - We have people in many departments using Kissmetrics.
- Development - The Dev team uses Kissmetrics to track things like feature adoption, which helps make the Product lead and the dev team make decisions.
- Marketing - Marketing uses KM to track purchase funnels and get data about conversions
- Customer Experience - CX uses KM to track user actions through the app, as well as retention