User Tracking Behaviors for 2022 that you should be aware
Disclaimer: This is a part of a series of articles on my career working for products. Each of them represents my way of viewing the world coached by mentors I admire the most and help me along the way.
Being part of the process of creating a product team is an exciting journey with a lot to learn. One of the most important initial steps is to decide a tool to track user behavior, in order to be data-driven. But which tool? How to implement?
To answer those questions, I've run into a research for the best tools available for tracking user behavior for 2022. This research is available for you here.
For what?
Before jumping into choosing the best tool for you, take a time to reflect on what are you looking for to measure?
Is that user behavior cross-platform? Are you a Saas? Do you want to analyze behaviors to ads campaigns?
Write down a list of your needs and then take a look into the list below.
Methodology
It was a exploratory research taking into account the following sources:
- Articles for the last 5 years comparing user tracking tools;
- App review websites, such as G2, Capterra and Getapp;
- Review from trusted fonts (friends of mine) who are working with such tools:
Here you will see the list of the following platforms:
- Google Analytics
- Heap
- Full Story
- Mixpanel
- Inspectlet
- Amplitude
- LogRocket
Research
Google Analytics
Website | G2 Reviews
What it is: Google Analytics is a freemium tool provided by Google for web analytics, which tracks and reports website traffic.
What it’s used for: analyzing website traffic; Bounce rates; Goal conversions; Funnels; Real-time visitor count; Customer behavior and acquisition channels; A/B test different layouts; Heatmap and
Price: free / Premium $150,000 yearly
Pros:
- Determining the user conversation rate of your online store.
- Evaluating the search keywords that is driving traffic towards your website.
- Understand the source of your incoming traffic.
- Measure user-related metrics such as number of unique users, page views, number of sessions along with average session time, and bounce rate.
- Rank your webpage according to popularity.
- Import real-time data from other sources.
- Find out the geographical location and used device of your users.
- Create customized reports.
Cons:
- Doesn’t allow retroactive analysis
- The premium version of the tool costs $150,000 yearly.
- Optimized more for static and page view-based websites.
- Requires constant user training due to regular changes and features being added to the tool.
- Requires the execution of a JavaScript file on the website in order to be included in the number of visits
Great for: Specially who are interested analyzing user traffic.
Heap
Website | Pricing | G2 Reviews
What it is: product intelligence.
What it’s used for:
- Automatic capture of every user action (without any manual code)
- Automatic tracking of user events
- Defining of active users and user segments
- Simple and point-and-click user interface for tagging websites and mobile apps without writing any code
Price: Free up to 10k sessions per month | Above that, contact the sales
Pros:
- Very easy to use for any stakeholder with little technical configuration or maintenance needed
- Free tier is great, and plans are affordable afterward
- Individual visitor behavior
- Much easier to determine web user behaviour and create sales funnels
- User-friendly and intuitive making it suitable for use by a wide range of users including product managers, data analysts, and UX designers.
- Easy to install and configure
- Real-time insights into user actions
Cons:
- Web and mobile web only, as this paradigm of non-technical configuration doesn’t work for native mobile apps
- Despite not requiring technical expertise, Heap’s actual user experience can be a bit daunting for non-technical stakeholders
- Limited customizability of charts and dashboards
- Requires a learning curve for users to configure and generate reports.
- Requires basic knowledge of HTML tagging
Great for: Non-technical stakeholders on any team of companies of any size
Full Story
Website | Pricing | G2 Reviews
What it is: advanced product and business analytics platform
What it’s used for: tracking customer behavior and KPIs across websites and mobile apps. It uses machine learning to drill down into the data and generate immediate insights about the users, as well as creating predictions on user behavior, based on their past actions.
Price: from free for 1,000 monthly tracked users
Pros:
- “I love that fullstory shows interesting stats like rage clicks, showing in an easy to view list what kind of device each user is loading the page on, and what site they were referred here by.”
- “Good tool to learn about users behavior and how to adapt to their needs and make their experience much better.”
- “They have been very nice and helpful to work with, from implementation to troubleshooting and determining a plan that might work for my company.”
- “FullStory has been a great tool that helps in collecting the user session data on our web product, it has been a great experience with the tool.”
- As a fast growing startup, we make a lot of decisions in an adhoc manner and go live. A lot of times this means no time for setting up analytics, and thus having no insights on google analytics etc. Fullstory acts as a catch-all analytics tool for me, where in I can restropectively go and see what impact my changes made. 0 effort needs to be spent on analytics since it is automatically collecting all data required to make a heatmap, session and what-not.
Cons:
- “The limited window of time that sessions are available for review, and it is quite expensive.”
- “Fullstory can be a bit slow or ‘laggy. It takes a bit to start capturing live sessions, and there is a considerable delay with go live.”
- “It also charges by session, not unique users, so if someone comes back again after 30 mins, it counts as another session.”
- “Occasionally, the reconstructed videos of user behavior are misleading. One serious issue is the inability to see iframes, but there’s probably nothing anyone can do about that.”
- “Customer service was poor. Price for minimum package was increased from USD $199 to $899. When I raised a concern, that I have recommended a new client, they did not consider my case as an existing partner introducing a customer to them, did not make any adjustments or gave me the old price as a one-time exception. First, a price increase of 450% does not make any sense. Secondly, no exception granted from a loyal customer and partner.”
- “The initial setup may sometimes take a bit of time to get going. You need to be patient for the first couple of minutes while your first sessions appear, but after that the product is very smooth.”
Great for: Modern and tech-savvy product and marketing teams and high-growth companies.
Mixpanel
Website | Pricing | G2 Reviews
What it is: advanced product and business analytics platform
What it’s used for: tracking customer behavior and KPIs across websites and mobile apps. It uses machine learning to drill down into the data and generate immediate insights about the users, as well as creating predictions on user behavior, based on their past actions.
Price: from free for 1,000 monthly tracked users
Pros:
- Web and native mobile
- Affordable at any tier
- Excellent user experience and interactive dashboards
- Robust features for customer relationship management
Cons:
- Extensive technical setup and some ongoing maintenance
Great for: Modern and tech-savvy product and marketing teams and high-growth companies.
Unlike traffic analytics tools, Mixpanel is designed to help SaaS and website owners get real-time data insights into how people interact with a product.
Inspectlet
Website | Pricing | G2 Reviews
What it is: Heatmaps and Session Recording Analytics
What it’s used for: Learn priceless information from observing your potential customers. See exactly what users are looking for and how they use your site. Understand their mindset and increase your conversion rate. Discover where visitors are getting confused on your site and what’s getting their attention.
Price: freemium. Average of U$79/month
Pros:
- Individual visitor behavior on your site with session recording.
- Conversion Funnels
- Tag your sessions and users.
- Heatmap
- Scroll heatmap
- Real-time customer analytics
- Easy to use interface
- Responsive customer service
- Live feature
Cons:
- “What I dislike a litlle bit about this software is that I can not configure everything in my own way, so I have to be too specific with the administration to it shows the design that I want. Therefore the interface is somewhat complicated.”
- “You can see when they are confused what to do next, you can see when they try to click on things that aren’t clickable, you can even see errors they encounter.”
- “When we enquired, it took 3 weeks for a response, when we replied with questions, no response whatsovever. Tool feels incomplete and lacking functionality.”
- Searching through session can experience lag
- Takes a while to learn all the features
Great for: Inspectlet is for individuals or companies with websites in which user tracking is necessary for profitable success. Inspectlet is best for understanding site visitor behavior, correcting website navigation, and improving sales funnels and conversions.
Amplitude
Website | Pricing | G2 Reviews
What it is: product intelligence.
What it’s used for: tracking product usage, user behavior, and funnel conversions. Amplitude is focused on tracking user experience and offers advanced features like behavior cohorting, and persona and user profile data.
Price: Free up to 10 million actions per month | Above that, contact the sales
Pros:
- Web and native mobile
- Far and away the most robust product analytics feature set of any solution
- Notifies on changes in product performance
- Closely monitor KPI trends and anomalies
- Instantly surface patterns in the product data
Cons:
- Requires technical expertise for virtually every step
- The free tier is great but after that, it can get expensive quickly
- It lacks some of the CRM capabilities of Mixpanel but makes up for it in the ability to distinguish signals from noise with.
Great for: Very technical product or data science teams at companies of any size.
- LogRocket
Website | Pricing | G2 Reviews
What it is: Frontend Monitoring and Product Analytics
What it’s used for: LogRocket combines session replay, performance monitoring, and product analytics.
- Session Replay
- Frontend performance monitoring
- Product Analytics
- Error tracking and management
- User experience analytics
Price: U$99/month
Pros:
- Recording not only screen activity but network and location information.
- Good for tracking user issues and guides them on how to do something in an app.
- Very easy to implement as it will take less than 15 minutes of development to hook in your application.
- Bug / Error Monitoring
- Very easy to use and saves you a lot of time. It identifies any issue quickly.
Cons:
- It consumers your memory a lot thereby might affect your apps
- It doesn’t work on server-side which means there is no integration with what happened server-side
- The loading time of the Logrocket tool is a bit slow which might become a hindrance in your work
Great for: Engineering and Product team. Monitoring errors and video session replays.
When implementing any of these solutions, should we use Google Tag Manager?
We know that by adding a code to load on <header> affects page speed. Here are some experiments showing the effects of Google Tag Manager (GTM) or hardcoded snippets on page performance.
Asynchronous does not mean there is no impact on page speed
Even though the elements are not blocked directly, asynchronous scripts still require computer resources meaning that the execution of the website’s main files/scripts slows down.
Few examples to prove this point:
Hardcoded tags (in <head> slowed down the website more (compared to GTM + those tags)
If you add those very same 8 scripts (used in the previous example) directly to the website’s source code, the results will probably be even worse. Because it’s not GTM itself that slows your website down, it’s what it’s put inside of it.
When added 8 tracking scripts directly to the site’s code (before the closed </head> tag), the page slowed down even more. Instead of 3 seconds increase in the page load timing, hardcoded tags added 600 milliseconds on a fast 3G connection.
At least based on this experiment, GTM does indeed help sites load a bit faster (comparing to the test where the same tags were hardcoded).
Conclusion
It’s all about compromises and sacrifices. There must be a balanced consensus in for what you need. Before adding any new tracking functionality, we should weigh the pros and cons. Yes, that setup will probably affect the page loading speed. But maybe it will have a great benefit for the business and in the bottom line. Or maybe something else can be removed/paused to compensate for the impact on performance at any stage.
Reference: Google Tag Manager vs Page Speed: The Impact and How to Improve
Comparison
For the comparison, it’s needed to raise the following question:
- How easy to use do it need to be?
- Do it need to be more product focused (for usability testing, tracking funnels, etc) or deep into data and user predictability?
Here is the comparison between the platforms more easy to use.
Impact Product was reviewed as really bad in technical support. For that reason, the research on this product stopped.
