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15 Comments

Which analytics tool do you use?

Hi gang, which analytics tool(s) do you use beyond GA, and why? I've never tried anything other than pretty basic and obvious stuff, and I wonder why would you need something else.

In particular, I'm thinking about whether I should integrate Segment. They promise easy integration with other tools, so I presume there are people who use multiple analytics, which means every one of them has their own USP. Is it something so complicated that GA can't handle? Or something so simple that GA is too big for it? Please share your advice.

#analytics #tools

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    Last year I switched all of our sites to Matomo (formerly Piwik). I admit to doing this for mainly idealistic reasons (moving away from Google) however it has definitely been a positive change for us for a few reasons.

    • Me and my staff have all found Matomo easier to use than GA
    • By using it for everything we can easily link separate sites together to see which sites are driving traffic to each other.
    • The act of changing any supplier forces you to re-evaluate things. Not necessarily a Matomo feature however we now have all sorts of things like form tracking which we never had before under GA.
    • The Matomo code is GA compatible. We have actually left GA on one site (our main one) as I hear that SEO companies much prefer using GA as their tools are written for it. That one site is reporting to both Matomo and GA with all the same tagging working for both providers.

    I hope this helps

  2. 2

    I use GA for my landing page / blog. GA is perfect to look at traffic source, conversions, and for everything "macro".

    For what's happening inside my webapp, I use Mixpanel.
    I track every event, click. It's great because you can go to one of your user's profile, and see every action he took on the website.

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      Do you use Mixpanel solely for tracking user's actions? They have a free plan, but their paid plan seems kinda pricey.

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        I use it for user action and funnels! I have several funnels like "Landing page to account confirmed"

        I'm still on the free plan, and it's great!

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      Thanks! Looking at all user's actions during their visit is priceless, especially at the early stage like mine.

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    Heap Analytics for in app analytics. Highly recommended with very generous free tier.

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      Can you tell us how it is better than GA?

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        Sure,

        it's not really better more different. With Heap it is extremely easy to track exact clicks, pageviews, actions, funnels and specific user behaviour. This enables all kinds of interesting, semi realtime dashboards like:

        "users with a trial plan, that have interacted with your app 3 times this week, have created x amount of widget and are 5 days from expiring the trial". You can then splice that by country, referrer, email address, device etc. etc.

        You can chug that data in a report and get a daily email with exactly that info.

        Also, heap does not require you to instrument your code with specific tags or event emitters. You can create all of these events and funnels after the fact.

        It also integrates directly with Stripe and is aware of UTM tags, so you can use it together with typical Google analytics campaigns.

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    I`ve been using hotjar (www.hotjar.com) and so far I like it. Heatmaps, visitor recording and conversion funnels are all great tools to improve your conversion ratio.

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      I've recently started using Hotjar in addition to GA for the landing page as well. I really like how quickly you can set it up. However, Firefox's private mode is blocking it by default, so not sure how valuable it will be in the long run. For the macOS app I use Fabric.

  5. 1

    I recently started using Fathom (https://usefathom.com/), free community edition self-hosted on DigitalOcean. Got convinced by this article:
    https://daverupert.com/2019/04/goodbye-google-analytics-hello-fathom/

    I like it so far. But it does feel very bare compared to GA!

    1. 1

      Thanks! It's very bare indeed. Might be OK for a blog, but I need much more from my analytics. Can it track returning visitors? I think no.

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    After listening to the podcast with Tim Soulo from Ahrefs (Ep 84) I feel like you can pretty much do everything you need with GA and not worry about the rest. I highly recommend listening to that episode.

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      Could u pls leave us the link?

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    This comment was deleted 5 years ago.

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