Product analytics tool provides organizations with visibility into their users’ experience with their product, such as visits, events, and interactions. With the self-servicing BI tool, businesses can analyze data and make it actionable to enhance user experiences.
Primarily used by product managers and growth marketer, product analytics tool allows data-driven decisions for software development and maintenance. However, with the customer’s ever-changing requirements, these tools now need to be upgraded and have groundbreaking features to stand out in the competitive market.
However, not every product analytic software will provide accurate and real-time insights. Based on experience and research of KMS Solutions, here’re the top 5 best product analytics tools you need to try at least one time for better business growth.
What Makes the Best Product Analytics Tool?
Although there are many product analytics tools available in the market, unfortunately, not all of them can bring you the best experience with detailed and in-time data. Here are the criteria that distinguish between the “normal” and the “best” product analytics software that you can consider when choosing one.
1. How is the Product Data Collected?
Product analytics tools generally collect data in these two methods: auto-capture or manual instrumentation. Manual instrumentation requires you to manually configure data collection (e.g. identify an event) for each type of interaction that you need to track and then wait for the data to be gathered on that event or interaction.
Otherwise, with auto-capture, a simple snippet is embedded in your product to record each user interaction. In addition to consuming less time, another benefit of auto-tracking is that you can subsequently retrospectively define events if you decide to track something new. Therefore, instead of waiting for a software developer to set up tracking events and spending time for the data to flow in, you can analyze that event immediately based on historical user sessions.
2. What Insights Can the Tool Track?
Although most tools claim to track every user interaction, there are significant differences in how detailed an evaluation you can do.
What makes the best tool is that it can provide insights in different levels to serve particular purposes of users. The software can vary from surface-level analysis (how many customers clicked a specific button) to deep-dive insights analysis requiring data science expertise to comprehend.
3. Can the Tool Support Native Mobile-app?
The software differs in terms of whether they support native mobile applications (at all), as well as the mobile development frameworks they offer. For the development team that works on both a desktop and native mobile version, it’s critical to have one tool that can handle both.
These criteria can be used in the following part to identify the pros and cons of different categories of tools.
Top 5 Best Product Analytics Tools
1. Amplitude
Amplitude is a powerful data analysis with 25,000+ users, almost enterprises with tons of data. It’s an analytics platform for websites and mobiles. With a broad spectrum of features, the product teams can obtain actionable insights from digital user journeys and leverage behavioural graphs to develop customer-focused products.
The tool also provides a plethora of interactive charts and advanced reports such as funnel analysis, event segmentation, or predictive analytics.
|
Pros |
Cons |
|
The tool is easy to use with built-in guidance (collected from product review platforms) |
The solution lacks a middle-tier plan for SMEs. Its next plan costs $995/ month, best suited for large businesses. High risk of overage |
|
This tool is extremely easy to deploy |
No lexicon for managing data governance. |
|
The software has its own CDP as an offer, even if light. |
Lacks integrations with other third-party service providers such as Insider, VWO,... |
|
Properties are only updated when an event is triggered. |
2. Mixpanel
Mixpanel contains much of Amplitude's functionality, with some advanced changes that add up. It is a powerful, self-serve event-based analytics for web and native mobile versions.
What makes the tool stand out is it combines the use of user analytics, marketing, and CRM to assist you in analysing how and why customers engage, convert, and retain in real-time to enhance their user experience.
Mixpanel has served over 26,000 businesses from various sectors worldwide, including Expedia, Uber, Ancestry, DocuSign, and Lemonade.
|
Pros |
Cons |
|
Ability to notify directly within the tool by sending targeted text, email, push, and in-app messages. |
Manual instrumentation makes the setup time-consuming and dependent on ongoing maintenance. |
|
Mixpanel’s free tier has unlimited core reports, monitoring capabilities, and 100,000 monthly tracked users (MTU). |
Only collects quantitative data. |
|
Offers backend SDKs for multiple programming languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, etc. |
The extensive interface with many features makes it overwhelming to use. |
|
Offers 50+ integrations and can connect directly to your data warehouse. |
3. Google Analytics 4
The best-known web analytics is probably Google Analytics 4 (GA4). As a free product, it is implemented widely. GA4 is the next generation of analytics tool powered by Google that collects event-based data from both websites and mobile apps.
The tool can assist businesses in identifying the top user traffic sources, evaluating the success of their marketing initiatives and campaigns, tracking goal accomplishments such as adding products to carts and purchases, discovering patterns and engagement trends, and obtaining other visitor data like demographics.
GA4 is frequently applied by SME organisations to gather and analyse different customer behaviour analytics, which can be applied to optimise the customer journey and better retain visitors.
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Pros |
Cons |
|
Free and easy-to-use, even for marketers at the junior-level. |
Premium version is costly, $150,000 per annum. |
|
Enables the delivery of detailed remarketing lists into AdWords. |
GA4 is only able to integrate within Google products like BigQuery. |
|
Ability to build out a dashboard that helps view stats effortlessly from multiple websites in one place |
History data import is limited. |
|
The free tier presents reports based on sampled data only, which may lead to inaccurate results. |
4. AppsFlyer
AppsFlyer is a SaaS mobile marketing analytics and attribution platform. Through cutting-edge, privacy-preserving measurement, analytics, fraud prevention, and engagement technologies, the solution assists companies in making decisions that are beneficial to their campaign management.
Developed on the premise that businesses can enhance consumer privacy while offering exceptional experiences, AppsFlyer empowers many clients and 8000+ technology partners to build stronger, more meaningful interactions with customers.
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Pros |
Cons |
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The ability to send push notifications, email and in-app messages. |
Limited dashboard customisation. |
|
Integrated with 9000+ partners |
For every API request, that queries data for more than 2 days is limited to 24 requests per day. |
5. Adjust
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As a mobile marketing analytics platform with global customers, Adjust offers solutions for evaluating and optimizing campaigns and protecting user data. The tool empowers apps and desktops with automation and built-in intelligence, backed by 24/7 customer support.
In 2021, AppLovin (Nasdaq: APP), a marketing software platform, officially acquired Adjust to offer developers an integrated set of solutions to address their mission-critical tasks, such as user acquisition.
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Pros |
Cons |
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Adjust's anti-fraud technology tool is best used for detecting click spamming and invalid traffic behaviour. |
Confusing and slow UI that needs a refresh. |
|
Blocks the postbacks for invalid traffic without triggering an install. |
Reports are limited and need more granularity. |
|
Limitations in terms of the character limits on each tracking link. |
Comparisons Between Product Analytics Tools
|
Amplitude |
Mixpanel |
GA4 |
AppsFlyer |
Adjust |
|
|
TARGET USERS |
Enterprise-scale business |
Freelancers, Large Enterprises, SMEs, Non Profit, Public Administration, Cross-platform companies |
Most for marketers |
Individual to SMEs. |
Freelancers, Large Enterprises, SMEs. |
| CORE REPORTS | |||||
|
Retention |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Segmentation |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Funnels |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| ADVANCED REPORTS | |||||
|
Flows |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
No |
|
Signals |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
No |
|
Cohorts |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Predictive analytics |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| HOW DOES IT WORK | |||||
|
Offer SDKs for iOS, Android and Game Development |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Offer backend SDKs for multiple programming languages |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
No |
|
Works well with |
Website & Mobile devices |
Website & Mobile devices |
Website & Mobile devices |
Mobile devices |
Mobile devices |
|
Integrations with market leaders |
Yes |
Yes |
No (One-vendor product suite: Doesn't support a best-of-breed approach and is locked into Google) |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Has lexicon in managing the data governance |
No |
Yes |
No |
No |
No |
|
The ability to protect customer's traffic from fraud |
No |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Supported destinations for exporting data to data warehouse or cloud storages |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Kind of ID is used in the tracking SDK for identify users |
Device ID, user ID, and Amplitude ID |
User ID |
User ID |
Device ID |
Device ID |
|
Works mostly based on |
event tracking |
event tracking |
event tracking & page views |
attribution tracking |
event tracking |
|
Advanced Ad-network integration with lots of ad-networks |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Sum Up
When looking for a product analytics tool, you may have a ton of equally good options to choose from. However, it’s worth keeping in mind that selecting a product analytics tool is a balancing act. This means that the appropriate software can provide you with the desired insights while not degrading your app’s performance with its functionalities.
Each tool has a unique set of strengths, and they need to be matched with your unique requirements. If you’re looking for software that can help you understand users, uncover hidden trends, and make data-driven decisions to unlock product-led growth, Mixpanel is the suitable option. It provides insightful reports, notifies directly within the tool, offers backend SDKs, and more at an affordable price for businesses of all sizes.
Don’t forget instead of blindly following the trends or marketing for App analytics providers, you can go to see experts who can consult to suggest you the best tool to fit your business model and your growth strategy.
