Google Analytics vs. Kissmetrics

Honesty, there is no reason that a company wouldn’t want to implement Google Analytics. The regular version is completely free, is very easy to configure, and provides immense volumes of website data. There are also tangible benefits to the other Google tools it can connect to, and it integrates with any BI/data platform that you might use. The only time I’d advise not using standard Google Analytics is if you’ve purchased Google Analytics 360.

Incentivized

[Kissmetrics is well suited for the] abandon cart scenario to re-engage users on the purchase journey. Engaging users to personalized content using the visit metrics derived from the data captured at each digital touch points. [Implementing] website campaign and journey orchestration is easy. You get visitor profile to segment upon using different visit metrics and action.

Incentivized

• Multiple reports to see website use and behavior
• Allows you to customize reports with days, weeks, months, and years
• You can build out a dashboard to easily view stats from multiple websites in one place
• You can share analytics reports via the dashboard, automatically emailed PDFs or in other formats

Incentivized

• Kissmetrics has a fantastic dashboard where you can see all relevant metrics immediately after login.
• Kissmetrics was extremely easy to implement in our site and it works across different platforms.
• After the initial setup, managing and creating new events to track is super simple.
• You can monitor live usage. This feature allows you to monitor user interactions as they are happening and as events you are tracking are triggered. You can see exactly what users are doing real time, which is really a very cool feature. At the time, this kind of realtime monitoring was not possible with Google Analytics.

• While raw data is nice to have, I do wish there was an easier way to provide reports from Google Analytics directly. Something that could answer questions straight-forward for people.
• I would appreciate "helpful hints" or a cheat sheet of some sort, so when quickly searching for something such as time on a certain page, I can find it quickly.
• I really don't have a third point!

Incentivized

• The biggest issue, is that I have lost faith in the accuracy of the data.
• There have been a few examples of the system producing what looks like spurious data. I triangulate the data using Google Analytics, and on a few occasions, there have been very wide discrepancies that indicate a potentially serious problem. For example, Google might indicate 1,000 page views, while KISSmetrics indicates 5,000.. This is not a constant problem, but it has happened enough where my faith in the data is shaken.
• It really doesn't matter how good the front-end functionality is if my faith in data accuracy is not 100%.
• A/B testing is much more difficult than it needs to be. It is possible to structure the product to enable A/B testing, but this involves reading a bunch of help files and writing some code. I would have expected this to work out-of-the-box. In Google Analytics, for example.you only have to enter two URLs and then it works. This was a surprise.

Having used Google Analytics for the last 9 years, I have no intention of discontinuing my service. Google Analytics is a fantastic product that provides me with almost everything I could wish for. The positives in this product outweigh any negatives that you might find. I can not think of a single reason to not immediately start using Google Analytics for your business.

I used KISSmetrics on a daily basis whilst a summer analyst at a language-learning software startup company called Voxy. To my knowledge, the company continued to use KISSmetrics. I am no longer at Voxy but we were pleased with KISSmetrics.

Google Analytics provides a wealth of data, down to minute levels. That is it's greatest detriment: find the right information when you need it can be a cumbersome task. You are able to create shortcuts, however, so it can mitigate some of this problem. Google is continually refining Analytics, so I do not doubt there will be improvements

For basic operations, the product is relatively user-friendly, considering how complicated a topic data and analytics can be. The engineering integration work is very straightforward, and building standard report types is pretty easy. However, there were a few rough spots. Event mapping and some of the deeper account settings are not well explained. And the Power Reports functionality is just utterly, impossibly confusing

We all know Google is at top when it comes to availability. We have never faced any such instances where I can suggest otherwise. All you need is a Google account, a device and internet connection to use this super powerful tool for reporting and visualising your site data, traffic, events, etc. that too in real time.

In a year, we had trouble logging-in just once. But even then all tracking data was later available once the site came back up. also, the system down notices were very informative - they explained the reason for the downtime and were constantly updated with progress in getting the problem resolved.

This has been a catalyst for improving our site's traffic handling capabilities. We were able to identify exit% from our sites through it and we used recommendations to handle and implement the same in our sites. We have been increasing the usage of Google Analytics in our sites and never had any performance related issues if we used Analytics

Speed improved dramatically as the service matured. Early iterations of the publicly-released application would occasionally provide slow processing of results, but those delays became much rarer occurrences during the last year that we used KISSmetrics. One of the more impressive views (which started out feeling more like a toy) is the live view of visits. Knowing that you could see, in real time, what events a user triggered, was gratifying and instructive.

The Google reps respond very quickly. However, sometimes they can overly call you to set up an apportionment. I'm very proficient and sometimes when I talk to reps, they give beginner tutorials and insights that are a waste of time. I wish Google would understand my level of expertise and assign me to a rep (long-term) that doesn't have to walk me through the basics.

Incentivized

Everytime that I've needed or contacted support, I've received a quick response and timely help! There was even a major issue we had with connecting Unbounce into Kissmetrics. They brought in multiple people and worked with us for hours to make sure we could figure out the issue and get everything running! I have no complaints about the support team!

Incentivized

Again, we were fortunate to work with KISSmetrics as they built their application, but Hiten, their CEO and founder, was incredibly helpful to me personally, and to our metrics-driven business as a whole, as we adopted their tool.

love the product and training they provide for businesses of all sizes. The following list of links will help you get started with Google Analytics from setup to understanding what data is being presented by Google Analytics.

1. How to Use Google Analytics for Beginners – Mahalo’s how-to guide for beginners.
2. A beginner’s guide to Google Analytics – A free eBook walking you through Google Analytics from setup to understanding what data is being presented.
3. Getting to Know Your Google Analytics Dashboard – The title says it all! This is a brief post with one goal: to introduce you to the Google Analytics dashboard.
4. Google Analytics for Beginners: How to Make the Most of Your Traffic Reports– This guide doesn’t cover setup, but it does a great job of helping you to better understand the data being presented.
5. Google Analytics Video Tutorial 1: Setup – A video presentation that walks you through Google Analytics setup.
6. Google Analytics Video Tutorial 2: Essential Stats – A video presentation that introduces you to some of the most important data being presented in Google Analytics.

I loved this aspect of the product. It wasn't just that the documentation and online tutorials are great - which they are - the on-boarding process though was really stellar. Once you have set everything up, you get a welcome message followed by a step-by-step guide to get you started that is built right into the product interface. For example, the UI asks you to first do X, and then copy this code snippet and send it to your developer who will know what to do with it. When you come back after the first interaction with the product, it continues the process by explaining right in the UI how to track events etc. This kind of step-by-step approach is incredibly efficient. Although there are various forms of supporting documentation (PDFs videos etc) to support every step, you don't really need them. This approach means that you are up and running very quickly with virtually no training time or documentation consultation. Highly efficient process.

Make sure to put the tracking code on every page. Ideally this would be part of a template or "include" so you can update the code on all pages (or at least within pages of the same category) at once.

In order to build trackability down to revenue, there was quite a lot of work to integrate Kissmetrics with our software and internal process. We had to build the hooks so that Kissmetrics could call back into our software and billing system, etc.. However, we didn't need additional expertise to do this. Once you understand the API, and you own systems, making it work is not too difficult. We did not require an outside consultant or anything like that

I have not used Adobe Analytics as much, but I know they offer something called customer journey analytics, which we are evaluating now. I have used Semrush, and I find them much better than Google Analytics. I feel a fairly nontechnical person could learn Semrush in about a month. They also offer features like competitive analysis (on content, keywords, traffic, etc.), which is very useful. If you have to choose one among Semrush and Google Analytics, I would say go for Semrush.

Incentivized

It has been a while since I demoed Heap and Optimizely but the main points that stick out in my head are that Kissmetrics had more transparent and cheaper pricing. Kissmetrics offered all the same functionality, and at least from my personal experience, the staff at Kissmetrics was easier to work with and nicer to interact with.

Incentivized

Google Analytics is currently handling the reporting and tracking of near about 80 sites in our project. And I am not talking about the sites from different projects. They may have way more accounts than that. Never ever felt a performance issue from Google's end while generating or customising reports or tracking custom events or creating custom dimensions

• Great for visualizing website drop-off pages to theories and test update/iterations.
• Bounce rates on pages to pinpoint bugs and issues.
• Inaccuracy can lead to incorrect conclusions and decisions around CRO.
• Segments can be very useful for validating split testing, providing a free tracking of variation vs. control - great ROI.

Incentivized

• Improved product
• More insights into users
• More insights into marketing channels and their performance
• Must admit that the live stream was a little bit addictive the first couple of weeks, but it's a necessary evil when you launch new features :)