I recently had an old co-worker ask me for recommendations on where I would start in order to bring his company’s data analytics tools and user tracking out of the 90’s.
The company I work for is behind the times. Think 1990’s and early 2000’s when it comes to tech, tracking, and marketing. They have a home grown CRM system and I’m in the process of standing up a CMS system to help handle static pages. They deal with home grown landing pages and need a better perspective on what’s happening with the user activity on their website.
Ouch.
Obviously the thoughts here may be different if you’re considering a young, bootstrapped startup trying to track everything you can versus an established business looking to transition to more modern analytics tools, but if I’m bringing a company up-to-date on user tracking and marketing analytics this is where I would start.
One Tool to rule them all …
1) Segment.com – Segment is the foundation for everything else here. When we’re tracking a user across any number of different products, as marketers we want to involve those hard-to-pin-down developers as little as possible. Segment is what lets you try that new tool, or make sure that different systems all have the same data, without involving dev every time. Person+Event based tracking is the core to many of these tools, and you don’t need to code up a different event call for each one, just write it once!
User/Event analytics
2) Google Analytics (GA) – It’s hard to beat free, and it’s especially hard to beat free-from-google. GA gives a great big picture view into what’s happening on your website. The default views are quite good for aggregate insights, but you don’t get any specific user tracking. That need leads me to…
3) Mixpanel (or Kissmetrics or Keen.io or Indicative.com) – User/event-based analytics. Track a single individual through your product, run cohort analysis, and even see events flowing through the software in real time. I enjoyed working with Mixpanel personally, but Kissmetrics has built up an incredible brand, too. If you’re slightly more on the developer side, Keen seems to allow for more customization. Indicative is a little younger, but I had a cool demo with them. Try them all for yourself; it’s easy, thanks to segment!
Marketing Automation
4) HubSpot – this would be higher priority, it just takes a lot more work to setup. If you can get yourself setup early to manage landing pages, content, newsletters, transactional emails all in one place, you’ll save a huge headache later. That said, the HubSpots and Marketos full-suite marketing automation packages are expensive. If I were doing it on a budget, I would cobble together a bunch of single-part solutions for about half the price.
CRM
5) Salesforce (or the HubSpot CRM) – A home-grown CRM at this point is absolutely ridiculous. The tools in this space are so powerful and so flexible that there’s one at every price point and every functionality level.
Paid Ads
6) Adroll – Retargeted ads are super cheap and pretty effective, in the grand scheme of paid ads. Adroll makes it easy to start up and stick to a budget, and see what’s working.
Honorable Mentions
7) Baremetics.com and Profitwell.com – If you’re using stripe for recurring SaaS payments, at this point it would be hard to live without these types of 1-click dashboard tools. They’re both still very early in product development and each have strengths and weaknesses, so check them out and see which you find more useful. Personally, though neither one of them likes me to admit it, I used both on basically a daily/weekly basis.
8) Fullstory – If you have a product where actually seeing user behavior can be important for training or troubleshooting, FullStory is a new tool to do just that.
With this collection of tools setup, you should be well on your way to moving your analytics and user tracking into the modern analytics era. Check back in the future for what I would do differently if I were boostrapping a startup versus bringing a more established company up-to-date.
[…] mentioned segment.com as the one tool to rule them all, and I think they’re doing a really amazing job simplifying the event-tracking side of […]