Analytics is one of the most often overlooked parts of bringing a business into the digital age. Measuring the effectiveness of your work, whether it's the engagement of your current customers (think: how often do you have repeat visitors to your website?) or the way they connect with you on social media (do your customers also like your Facebook page?) or how much time it takes people to go from knowing about your products to buying your products, analytics are important.
There's a lot of solid platforms out there that you can use, from the free to the...not so free. But they all allow you to connect with deeper insights into your audience, your customers and your income, and they all empower you to make intelligent and informed decisions.
From Contently's review:
Google Analytics is the go-to platform for many marketers, in large part because it’s totally free, chock-full of features, and comes with the clout of the Google brand name.
After you enter the Google Analytics code into your website’s HTML, the service will measure certain goals for you, including which pages a visitor clicks on, how long they stay, and the actions they take. For example, the tool can tell you whether a visitor is sharing the content on social media or clicking on an ad. Each time a goal is completed, Google logs the conversion in your analytics report.
That's pretty spot on. Google analytics is the free platform most people use. But free doesn't mean that it lacks features, it's one of the most detailed and powerful platforms out there.
From Yurbi's review:
Without question, Tableau’s data virtualization is head and shoulders above what traditional BI vendors offer. Tableau made its mark on the world of BI by being one of the first companies to give business users the ability to perform fairly complex data visualization in a very intuitive, drag and drop manner. Its data visualization is also impressively interactive. The user can highlight sections and drilldown into charts without extensive skills or assistance from IT. Gartner’s most recent Magic Quadrant reveals that more than 70 percent of Tableau’s customers selected the product because of its ease of use for the business user. If you want high powered data visualization, you’ve found it with Tableau.
Tableau is on the opposite end of the spectrum. It's paid, and it's not cheap. But it's both powerful and fully integrated, meaning it can give you smarter data than many other platforms out there.
From G2Crowd's review:
The reporting capabilities of Kissmetrics is better than most of the other tools out there. Adding conditions and filters couldn't be easier and the reports that are generated are very thorough and straightforward.
Kissmetrics has many different report types for varying business needs and that will you analyze user data the way you need to look at it.
There's not much to dislike about Kissmetrics but if I had to choose one thing, it's the lack of the automatic event tracking that some of the other tools have. If you've forgotten to add an event, it doesn't pull data retroactively once you've added it.
Kissmetrics is a great engagement analytics platform that requires a bit of onboarding to think of every event that you need to track on your site and/or app. Sometimes events can slip through the cracks and adding that event doesn't retroactively pull data like some other tools.
Kissmetrics is another paid tool, but if you're looking for something that has a lot of potential to communicate with other platforms and apps, it's a great option and their informative content can really help you learn and understand how to use it and why!
