Top 10 Consumer Behavior Analysis Tools (+ Features)

First, an Overview:

As customer expectations continue to rise, It has become increasingly crucial for businesses to distinguish themselves from their competitors. To do this, they must proactively know and analyze the changes in consumer behavior. It helps them understand how users behave and interact with the product.

For PMs, consumer behavior analysis tools give a fair idea of various factors influencing your consumers' choices. It also helps identify the underlying motives that compel your users to decide on your product. These insights help you dissect and comprehend buying behaviors and drive product-led growth.

This post will guide you through the top ten consumer behavior analysis tools, highlighting their key features and functionalities. Let’s get started on unraveling the intricacies of consumer behavior analysis!

What Are Consumer Behavior Analysis Tools?

Consumer behavior analytics tools are a set of analytical tools you can leverage to gather, analyze, and interpret data related to consumer behavior. They share behavioral insights about potential customers and those who are yet to purchase.

These tools help you understand how consumers interact with your website, products, and marketing messages.

Further, they give you deep insights into the latest market trends, industry dynamics, and more that can influence consumer choices and their decision about purchasing from you.

Some of the most common consumer behavior analysis tools include:

• Product analytics tools.
• Social media analytics tools.
• Trends monitoring systems.
• Heatmaps.
• Website analytics tools.
• User experience testing tools.

Time for a fundamental question that demands more focus: “Why should you track consumer behavior?”

Why Track Consumer Behavior?

Consumer behavior helps you understand consumer preferences, requirements, pain points, and habits. Let's take an example to understand this better.

Let’s say a potential qualified lead checks out your product and leaves without booking a demo. A consumer behavior analysis tool can help you understand the customer's behavior on the page and what made them drop off instead of finishing the flow and booking a demo. It helps you identify the trends and patterns in the lead's behavior that you can then leverage to target this lead (and other leads like them) in a personalized way and eventually make them convert into a paying customer.

Similarly, imagine a user signing up for your product but eventually never using it. A customer behavior analysis tool can help decipher this purchase behavior and reveal patterns and trends that indicate potential hesitations, preferences, and roadblocks that you can use to activate them.

Here are some things a consumer behavior analysis report can help you with:

• Predicting a customer’s value
  Consumer behavior analysis tools employ advanced analytics to analyze historical data and identify patterns and trends. You can use this analysis to confidently predict consumers' potential value and likelihood of purchasing.
  
  
• Personalizing customer experience
  Consumer behavior analysis tools in marketing give you a deeper understanding of consumer preferences, browsing history, and more. You can leverage this information to build personalized campaigns. This includes sending targeted messages, sharing tailored product recommendations, running informed campaigns, etc.
  
  
• Improving customer retention
  ‍Consumer behavior analysis tools tend to have ways to indicate customer satisfaction and can help you detect early signs of dissatisfaction or potential churn. You can address these issues in time with targeted campaigns, personalized communication, customized offers and promotions, loyalty programs, and more.

‍Customer behavior analysis tools empower you to make data-driven decisions by understanding and predicting consumer behavior. These insights help you foster long-term relationships with your consumers and contribute positively to your business's revenue.

Top 10 Consumer Behavior Analysis Tools (+ Features)

Here are some fantastic tools you can leverage to conduct thorough consumer behavior analysis for your business.

#1. Houseware

Houseware is the 3rd-gen consumer analysis software built for forward-looking organizations. You can leverage this platform to gain deeper insights into your consumers.

The platform leverages product event data the best and creates powerful visualizations of customer actions and the steps they take in their buying journey. By helping you gauge consumer actions within your product, you can align your product development, marketing, sales, and customer service strategies to consumer expectations, which is crucial for product-led growth. Being warehouse-native, Houseware eliminates the need to cut-copy-paste data to and from multiple sources. This helps teams slash unnecessary costs and save time.

Key features:

• Create funnels to monitor your consumer journey in just a few clicks.
• Determine how many consumers convert using the flow feature.
• Gain insights into consumer retention using retention heatmaps.
• Create cohorts to analyze data for a particular set of consumers.
• Measure how often consumers engage with your website/product using the stickiness feature during a specific time frame.
• Build comprehensive visualizations to get a 360-degree view of consumer data at one glance.

Pros:

• Self-serve and easy-to-use platform.
• Inexpensive as compared to other tools in the market.
• Allows you to build amazing visualizations without coding.
• Offers 30+ predefined templates and blocks for building data-rich dashboards.
• Can be utilized by cross-functional teams to drive product/business growth.
• Integrates seamlessly with existing systems.

G2 ratings:

4.6 out of 5 stars

Ideal for:

Mid budget but high-traffic companies looking for self-serve and no-code product analytics

#2. YouTube Analytics

If you post videos on YouTube to promote your business, then YouTube Analytics is the right tool for monitoring your channel audience. YouTube Analytics offers excellent insight and data about your channel's performance and audience engagement. The platform provides a comprehensive overview of various metrics, such as watch time, views, traffic sources, likes, dislikes, comments, shares, playback locations, and more to understand audience behavior and engagement.

Key features:

• Offers a centralized dashboard displaying key metrics, such as views, subscriber count, watch time, viewer demographics, and more.
• Shares details about your traffic sources i.e. where viewers are discovering your content, their location, and more.
• Share detailed metrics on how viewers are engaging with your content, how long they are watching your videos, and more.
• Provides insights about the content performance. This helps you learn what type of content does (and does not) work for your viewers.

Pros:

• Offers a user-friendly interface for monitoring
• Provides insights into ad performance and revenue generated through these ads (for monetized channels)

Cons:

• Involves a learning curve
• There might be some delay in displaying real-time analytics

Ideal for:

Analyzing consumer engagement on videos and their performance.

#3. Amplitude

Amplitude is a consumer behavior analysis solution that offers excellent analytics data to track how consumers engage with your product. It offers a unified view of all consumers with detailed insights into the intent behind their actions.

Key Features:

• Track and analyze consumer interactions or events within your product
• Categorize consumers into various segments based on their demographics, behaviors, and more
• Create and track behavioral cohorts to analyze consumers with similar behaviors
• Build conversion funnels to monitor consumer journeys
• Generate intelligent reports to monitor consumer behavior in real-time

Pros:

• Focuses on individual consumer behaviors
• Offers visualization of consumer journeys thereby helping you identify areas of improvement
• Designed to handle large volumes of consumer data

Cons:

• Involves technical implementation and requires support from engineering teams
• Fairly expensive to scale.

G2 ratings:

4.5 out of 5 stars

Ideal for:

Organizations with a proficient analytics team and resources to implement the solution.  

#4. Google Trends

Google Trends is a helpful tool that uses real-time data to share insights about the trending search queries on the set search criteria. You can utilize this tool to learn about what your consumers are searching for online—from real-time search trends to queries. Besides, you can leverage Google Trends to identify consumer demand, discover the product features your consumers find important, and determine what your consumers are searching about your competitor brands.

Key features:

• Monitor search interest for specific terms over a desired time period.
• Determine trending and popular search queries related to your business.
• Discover related search queries and topics to understand your audience better.
• Tap into real-time search data to stay updated at all times.

Pros:

• Offers valuable insights into what your consumers are looking for.
• Provides search data customization flexibility for better insights.
• Helps identify relevant search terms which can then be used as keywords.

Cons:

• Might not be effective for long-term trend analysis.
• It is limited to comparing data and not the intent behind it.

G2 ratings:

4.5 out of 5 stars

Ideal for:

High traffic websites.

#5. Mixpanel

Mixpanel is another consumer behavior analytics tool that analyzes consumer interactions on your website/product and helps you convert them into loyal customers. With its event-based tracking, you can track a wide range of activities, such as clicks, downloads, form submissions, purchases, sign-ups, and any other action that consumers may take within your website/product.

Key features:

• Allows you to track and analyze various consumer events.
• Supports consumer segmentation for targeted analysis.
• Provides engaging dashboards to track desired metrics in real-time.
• Offers real-time reporting tools that can be used to monitor changing consumer behaviors.

Pros:

• Supports flexible event tracking. You can define events and track them to monitor consumer interactions.
• Works seamlessly across web and mobile platforms.

Cons:

• Involves a steeper learning curve, especially for users who are new to advanced analytics
• Might need engineering support to create, build, and manage custom event-tracking parameters.

G2 ratings:

4.6 out of 5 stars

Ideal for:

Organizations with a robust engineering department or team to ensure successful implementation and optimal use.

#6. Hotjar

Hotjar is a consumer behavior analysis tool that allows you to discover, monitor, and analyze your consumers. It offers a suite of tools that gives you amazing insights into what your consumers are doing on your website.

Key features:

• Visualize consumer behavior with heatmaps.
• Monitor individual consumer activity with session recordings.
• Understand the reasons behind consumers' behavior with surveys, polls, and feedback collection.

Pros:

• Easy to set up and requires minimal technical expertise.
• Affordable.

Cons:

• Does not offer advanced analytics like other tools in this list.
• Might slow down your website performance due to its additional scripts.

G2 ratings:

4.3 out of 5 stars

Ideal for:

Web and mobile site owners looking to understand consumer behavior.

#7. Heap

Heap is an excellent digital insights platform offering detailed analysis of consumers' journey with your website/product. Heap captures every consumer action within your product, converts it into easy-to-grasp behavioral data units, and presents it in comprehensive line graphs and charts. It offers an excellent retroactive analysis feature that tracks every consumer action without you having to configure it to do the same.

Key features:

• Tracks consumer actions like clicks, taps, page views, and more automatically.
• Allows segmentation of consumers based on their behavior, location, and device type.
• Generates various types of consumer behavior analysis reports.

Pros:

• Captures every consumer interaction without any manual intervention.
• Offers plug-and-play dashboard templates for seamless monitoring.

Cons:

• Involves a steep learning curve.

G2 ratings:

4.4 out of 5 stars

Ideal for:

Tracking consumer interactions automatically, without manual intervention

#8. Mouseflow

Mouseflow is an intuitive consumer behavior analysis tool that helps you optimize website experiences to boost conversions and ensure consumer retention. It tracks clicks, mouse movement, and scroll behavior across your website to give you valuable insights about your consumers.

Key features:

• Watch how your consumers interact with your website using session replays.
• Visualize every consumer engagement using intuitive heatmaps.
• Build custom campaign funnels to measure consumer journey.
• Seek feedback using surveys and form analytics.

Pros:

• Offers 6 website heatmap tools in a centralized application.
• Allocates friction score to identify behavior patterns from frustrated consumers.

Cons:

• There might be some delay in loading session replay videos.

G2 ratings:

4.6 out of 5 stars

Ideal for:

UX professionals and product managers.

#9. FullStory

FullStory is an intuitive digital experience intelligence platform that offers critical insights about consumer behavior crucial for product-led growth. It captures the entire consumer journey and shares comprehensive insights about your consumers.

Key features:

• Captures every click, scroll, page view, swipe, form submission, and more automatically.
• Generates frustration signals to help you understand where, when, and why consumers struggle with your website/product.
• Generates intelligent user trends and other consumer behavior analysis reports for better monitoring.

Pros:

• Shares rich visualizations containing accurate consumer data.
• Offers flexibility to view historical data without any hassles.

Cons:

• Cost may be relatively higher depending on the usage level.

G2 ratings:

4.5 out of 5 stars

Ideal for:

Product teams looking to analyze both quantitative and qualitative data.

#10. Userlytics

Userlytics is a user experience research and testing platform that can be leveraged extensively to track consumer behavior on your website/product. It is well-known for its intuitive usability testing tools.

Key features:

• Offers excellent usability testing tools to understand how consumers interact with your product/website.
• Provides session playbacks and visual heatmaps to support consumer analysis.
• Collects all consumer insights - qualitative data, graphical reports, and advanced metrics into a centralized dashboard for seamless interpretation.

Pros:

• Supports over 8 types of usability testing.
• Supports testing on both desktops and mobile devices.

Cons:

• Involves a learning curve, especially for users without extensive knowledge of conducting usability studies.
• Very expensive when compared to other similar tools.

G2 ratings:

4.4 out of 5 stars

Ideal for:

Organizations looking to improve user experience and usability for their websites and apps.

Conclusion

Consumer behavior analysis tools can give you incredibly useful insights into your consumers. They help you better understand the consumer journey, pain points, desires, requirements, and more.

The behavior analysis tools mentioned in this post are some of the best available today. These tools are being used by leading companies all over the world to understand their customers and design better products.

Houseware–a new age behavior analytics tool offers a suite of features that helps you analyze your consumer behavior successfully. Unlike other software, Houseware eliminates the need to resort to multiple data sources at a time to retrieve consumer data. It integrates seamlessly with the single source of truth — your data warehouse so you can keep track of everything in one place.

Book a demo with our team to understand how you can simplify behavior analysis with Houseware.

FAQs

1. What are the 4 types of consumer behavior?

The four types of consumer behavior are:

• Habitual buying behavior: Seen in daily low-involvement purchases.
• Variety-seeking behavior: Seen when consumers choose one product but buy something entirely different.
• Complex buying behavior: Seen when consumers conduct extensive research and analysis before making the purchase.
• Dissonance-reducing buying behavior: Seen in consumers who depict post-purchase discomfort; fearing they made a wrong choice.