Tools for tracking your metrics

This tutorial will briefly cover some tools that you can use to keep a tab on the performance metrics of your website.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is perhaps the most popular tracking-tool out there. Getting this set up entails adding a line of code to your webpage and gives you all sorts of usage data such as visits, bounce rate, pages per visit, and new visitors across both web and mobile.

CrazyEgg

CrazyEgg is a tool that gives you all sorts of click-data and heat-maps to better understand how users are interacting with your website — where they click, where their cursor rests, where they scroll.

KISSmetrics

KISSmetrics is a tool that allows one to set-up custom metrics and set-up funnels to better understand how users move through the various pages on your webpage and where they are dropping off. The tool is also extremely valuable in setting up A/B tests for your products.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a tool that competes with KISSmetrics for business and the market is split almost evenly between the two.

Heap Analytics

Heap Analytics is another competitor to KISSmetrics and Mixpanel that pioneered the idea automatically tracking every end-user touchpoint. Doing so enables one to make business decisions faster without ever having to deal with tracking plans, tracking code, or tags.

Segment

Segment is not a tool, but an analytics API and customer data platform that interfaces with each of the tools mentioned above. Every time one decides to switch out metric-tracking tools, they have to swap out a line of code on their webpage. If one uses Segment, however, tracking-tools can be swapped out on the Segment platform itself without having to touch the codebase. In addition to providing a one-stop-shop for managing analytics tools, Segment also backs up all your customer data to ensure that one never loses data when switching metric-tracking services.