Top 10 Essential Product Usage Analytics Tools

Globally, 3 out of 5 businesses use some form of analytics to enable their business goals today. Of these, 91.9% feel confident in the value they get from the emphasis on analytics. So if you are still wondering whether you should invest in a product usage analytics tool, the answer is most definitely yes.

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This is especially true if you work in a product-led business — where your primary offering is a product, whether that’s a SaaS product or a B2C/consumer app.

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Your business would mostly likely have some form of an analytics arm to enable your product team with insights into customer behaviour. For some businesses this arm is essentially a group of analysts manually running SQL queries. While this is better than nothing, it’s not the most effective solution — PMs have to deal with long time delays, frustrating back and forths, and stay dependent on analysts for even slightly complex insight.

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This is what a dedicated product analytics tool solves brilliantly.

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It not only helps your PMs analyze product data but enables them with real-time visibility into their initiatives and makes analysis incredibly self-serve. They can then use their trusted product usage analytics tool to stay on top of user behavior, KPIs, and opportunities.

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Now, the big question: which of the many available product usage analytics tools should you trust? Making this decision is hard, and we intend on helping here. This blog will do a deep-dive into the top 10 product usage analytics tools in the market, along with their key features and other details you should be aware of.

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What Is a Product Usage Analytics Tool?

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A product usage analytics tool helps you process, analyze, and ultimately visualize your product usage and user behavior data in the form of user-friendly dashboards. More often than not, they run on top of the clickstream data — record of events and user activities.

These tools have out-of-the-box visualization capabilities like flows, funnels, trends, and charts that you can leverage to get to directional answers and insights quickly. Some examples of these insights would be: data on a specific feature’s adoption, navigation flow between two steps, drop-off points, behavior of a cohort, etc.

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Key Features to Look for in a Product Analytics Software:

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Different product usage analytics tools offer a plethora of different features, while some of them are absolutely crucial, some of them are just good-to-haves. Here we will list out the non-negotiable features that you make for a good product usage analytics tool:

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1. User Segmentation

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Often PMs and PMMs need to create a sub-group/segment of their users to run targeted campaigns, get specific insights, unravel trends, or create personalized experiences. To do this, all good product analytics tools offer “user segmentation” — this very ability to create subsets of your user database.

Generally, you’d use traits such as demographics, behavior, or usage patterns to base these segments on. For example: users in colorado, users who paid using plan a, users in the age group of 20-40, etc.

Segmentation leveraged well can uplift the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, product rollouts, and product experience. Hence, any product usage analytics tool you pick should have the capabilities to create user segments.

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‍2. A User-Friendly Interface

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This one is a must. When trying to make sense of product usage data, you would likely end up dealing with enormous amounts of data — complex in every meaning of the word. This is why it is absolutely essential that you pick a product analytics tool with a highly-rated and friendly interface. Easy UI here wouldn’t just reduce the overwhelm with navigating a new product but also enable your PMs to delve deeper into the complexities of different visualizations.

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‍3. Funnels Functionality

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A funnel is essentially a collection of steps taken by a user to achieve a specific target state. The target state here can be things like making a purchase on your app, or something as simple as signing up.

The funnel capability makes it easier for you to map user/cohort journeys, identify drop-off points, and then rollout informed initiatives to improve the rate of conversion and user experience. Any product usage analytics tool you pick should offer you the capability to create funnels.

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4. Reporting and dashboarding

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In addition to analysis, tracking and reporting your KPIs and important business metrics is a crucial responsibility of every product team. Good reporting capability helps you quickly set up different views for different stakeholders and effectively communicate the good and the bad to the entire organization.

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‍Top 10 Product Analytics Tools

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Let's now look at the top 10 product usage analytics tools available in the market. Here is a list of these tools with their essential features, pros, and cons to help you decide.

Mixpanel is a self-serve product analytics solution that helps you turn your clickstream data into insights.

Key Features

• Monitor essential metrics: engagement, standard events, custom events, retention, and conversions.
• Discover deep insights from your product usage data.
• Integrate with a host of third-party tools like Slack, Google Cloud, Optimizely, and Zoho.

Pros

• Mixpanel has a strong and friendly user interface making it easy for your team to get started.

Cons

• From public reviews, it seems that the cohort feature in Mixpanel has limited functionality and could use some developments.
• Since Mixpanel works on top of your clickstream/event data, your product usage analysis will be restricted. If you’d like to get more cross-functional analysis, you might need to do some manual analysis.

Rating

4.6/5