Hello, everyone. I’m a brand-new product manager for websites. My employer provides business-to-business inspection services, and our SaaS platform allows customers to analyze information obtained from inspections. I’m new to the company, however apart from conducting customer interviews, we don’t have much knowledge on how our users interact with our platform.
Therefore, I’m looking at website analytics to observe how our users interact with our platform and which sites they visit, as well as to assist us in identifying pages that load slowly, have friction spots, or have issues. Since we don’t really sell using the platform, we don’t really need to track conversion rate. Yet we might in near future.
Since our crew is already overworked, I’m seeking for a low-dev implementation. I’ve set up and executed demonstrations with a complete narrative and amplitude. Overall, I thought the auto-capture feature for the entire tale was great, but amplitude basically said it wasn’t. Do you have any opinions on these two possibilities and suggestions for any others I should test? My objective is to try out whole tale to see how simple it truly is. If it’s feasible, I’d like to test three distinct possibilities.
Although it would be nice to have a single solution for all, since we have both web and mobile apps, it is not a deal-breaker.
I have a list of further companies, but I haven’t done any study on them yet. userpilot, mixpanel, hotjar, fresh paint, and clarity.
We use Pendo and adding their code snippet is pretty simple. A developer would finish in under a day. I don’t think it will be useful for tracking page load times, but it’s wonderful for recording what pages your people are visiting, the features they’re using most frequently, and overall traffic patterns.
The best feature of Pendo is that events don’t need to be instrumented in advance. It records each and every DOM activity. When you tag things afterwards, the statistics are pulled back.
Amplitude won’t work well if you desire low effort implementation. You’ll need something with automatic event tracking. Amplitude has its beginnings in mobile and product analytics, so it’s not unexpected they would say it’s not as excellent at that. In contrast, FullStory was initially more of a session recording tool and it’s developed from there.
If you’re also looking for speed measurement (RUM), that complicates things a little because most tools don’t offer that as part of their analytics suite or do so with such high levels of sampling that the results aren’t particularly trustworthy. In GA3/UA, for instance, RUM measurement is included, however the sampling rate restrictions are relatively low (beginning at 1%). Although that kind of reporting can be added to a platform like Posthog, it is usually done through a different tool like DataDog, Speedcurve, NewRelic, etc. Last I knew, FullStory does not feature it.
@NathanEndicott, Hello and thanks for the comments. I felt like way a little bit throughout the call with Amplitude. Is auto-tracking as harmful as they claim? What other trustworthy websites should you check out to compare the whole story? Mixpanel, Hotjar, Fresh Paint, and Userpilot are a few that I have on my list of things to check out. Any of these that I should throw away right away?
@MelissaJames, if you don’t have a lot of development time available to instrument events, I believe auto-tracking can be a perfect fit. Although explicitly identifying each event captured, like Amplitude does, produces better ordered data, it may not be feasible for some businesses. It’s wonderful how Heap and Posthog handle auto-tracking because you can still specify which of the automatically recorded events you’re most interested in.
Do you want a platform that combines session capture with web/product analytics, or are you seeking for two different products? Mixpanel, in my opinion, does not perform session capture, and HotJar does not perform web analytics. Userpilot, I’ve only ever used Sisense as a BI dashboarding tool; I’ve never utilised Fresh Paint, Userpilot, or Zoho (which is I believe its main focus). Try PostHog first if you want session capture and product analytics under one roof.
Yes, I did some additional study on the dashboard products from Sisense and Zoho. We have much too many tools in our business and we need to streamline; therefore, in a perfect world, I’d need one platform that combines session capture and web/product analytics. Do you have a justification for why I wouldn’t want it combined? maybe a price?
@MelissaJames, the need for different tools is driven more by the need for the best tool for the job than by cost, though cost can undoubtedly be a factor (many people use Microsoft Clarity since it’s free and decent, for instance). PostHog lacks several capability relating to session recording that HotJar, FullStory, Smartlook, etc. have. Although combining does make it simpler to switch between the data, it is more common to have that functionality in two different tools so you can get the most out of each one.
Thank you for the information; FullStory and Sentry will soon be deployed for a one-month test. In terms of the RUM FullStory’s page load times, I believe this meets my demands. Is there something I’m overlooking?
A trial will be a good confirmation if you believe it meets your needs. Since they launched their new product analytics tool, I haven’t used FullStory. Sentry, I assume, also performs RUM measures.
If you want analytics solutions that require no work, check out Browsee. Session recordings and the basic metrics provided by GA make it one of the best tools for product managers because they allow you to pinpoint exactly where your users are experiencing a problem.
You may integrate it to your website easily and get information in a short form using https://www.hotjar.com, which I believe will work for you. The following are available to you: user behaviour, hot-maps, satisfaction surveys, user country, and session information. The greatest tools are Amplitude and Mixpanel, but using them as a beginner will be challenging and pricey.
Consider using browser monitoring tools if you want to increase the UI’s performance. Atatus has an analytics function for collecting complete, extensive insights on how websites perform if you wish to monitor backend services. Cheers.