On Mixpanel you can view live activity on the site from both streams of events or broken down into your actual users. This can be very practical for de-bugging and catching errors as they happen, especially for new, buggy products.
Mixpanel allows you to send notifications based on users actions. For example, you can use it to improve customer retention by analyzing the conditions where your users decide to leave your product and then send targeted messages designed to bring them back. This is an amazingly powerful feature that really bridges the gap between analyzing the data and acting on it.
Online interface makes it simple to view events, and aggregate data.
Queries can be built by selecting actions and associated properties from a drop-down, and the corresponding data will be displayed. These queries can then be bookmarked for later use. A table view and CSV export option is also available. Multiple queries can be displayed together, making it easy to compare two sets of data, or to view the relationship between them.
The interface also features a "Live View", allowing you to watch events as they are sent, which is useful for testing, and viewing realtime events.
Because the revenue tracking doesn't allow for fractions of dollars per visit (at least not as of 2014) any site that makes money based on advertising won't be able to leverage the revenue metric features.
Mixpanel allows you to directly contact users from the people dashboard via push notifications, sms, and email. After viewing the user history, or filtering on events and metrics, you can send an individual user, or a segment direct messages.
Funnel analysis allows you to see how many people have performed certain sequence of actions. You can use this to understand what part of the sequence needs to be improved the most.
Events can be grouped on a per-user basis allowing you to view each user's event history. You can use that information to see how individual users use your product.
Cohort analysis allows you to compare things like user retention over time, what kind of progress has been made with that retention over time, how many people perform certain actions from a set starting point over time, etc.
Funnel analysis allows you to see how many people have performed certain sequence of actions. You can use this to understand what part of the sequence needs to be improved the most.
KISSmetrics offers the following ways to integration into your application:
Language Specific APIs - Official support for Javascript, Ruby, PHP, Python and Objective C. There is also third party libraries for most of the popular languages not officially covered.
CSV import
Support for integrating with Mailchimp and Recurly.
Look at any blog post written about analytics tools and you will see the KISSmetrics team engaging with their customers. There are also stories such as this one of the KISSmetrics CEO personally reaching out to his customers immediately as they need help.
KISSmetrics lets you add a parameter in your URL (i.e. “http://yoursite.com/yourpage?kme=Track+This+Event”) and then automatically logs it without any additional Javascript code. This is very helpful to track clicks on links for example and is not currently support in Mixpanel.
At the end of the day revenue is the key metric for SasS businesses and KISSmetrics really shines here. You can track:
Total Revenue
Average {Daily/Weekly/Monthly} Revenue
Predictive Lifetime Value (Killer feature)
Avg Customers / (Day/Week/Month)
Churn. A very important metric and a key enabler (or disabler) of revenue.
The revenue reports can also be segmented for further analysis. The KISSmetrics documentation give some examples on the sort of questions the revenue report can answer:
How much revenue did I make this month compared to last month?
Which of my pricing plans is contributing the most revenue?
Which ads have brought in the most paying customers?
What referring sites do most paying customers come from?
How much did an A/B test affect revenue?
A key advantage KISSmetrics has over Mixpanel in particular is its ability to not only calculate custom formulas, but display the data in a "snapshot" view with a modifiable time period. This is a killer feature for building your companies dashboard.
After adding a JavaScript snippet to the site, Heap captures every event that you can organize later instead of having to define events upfront. It means that if you decide to track something new you have data from the past as well.
Cohort analysis allows you to compare things like user retention over time, what kind of progress has been made with that retention over time, how many people perform certain actions from a set starting point over time, etc.
Heap determines cost of service based on monthly visits instead of the more common data point based pricing that incentivises tracking less data points to save money.
The free plan allows you to log 10 million events per month. There are also 2 paid plans - Business and Enterprise. Business costs $995 and allows for up to 100M events per month while Enterprise has the price is negotiated on a case by case basis and supports an unlimited number of events.
Event Flows, an Enterprise level feature, shows a branching user-action path from or towards a certain page/action.
For example, it could show most popular actions performed after landing on a product page or the most popular path towards clicking the buy button.
Compared to funnels, that allow you to track if users follows a predetermined path and where they drop off, Event Flows show what users choose to do instead. And while it's possible to create a funnel for each branching path, that involves a lot of time and some guesswork which is not present in Event Flows.
Additionally, it's possible to integrate Amplitude with Mode to create a User Paths report. It's similar to the Event Flow, but visualized differently.
Google Analytics is free unless you need their premium service, which is $150,000 per year. However, it's only necessary for massively large enterprise size data sets.
Depending on the most important information to the user, the dashboard can be customized in order to put emphasis on certain metrics. This feature allows Google Analytics to satisfy users from a broad range of industries.
Madkudu analyzes user-data and let's you know if a user is struggling and plans to leave or if a user is ready to convert needs a push in the right direction.
GoSquared has 4 views - Now, Trends, E-commerce and People. "Now" is a dashboard that gives an overview of what's happening on the site in real time, "Trends" displays information like most visited content, referrals, engagement, etc over a period of time, "E-commerce" displays analytics about your online shop and "People" shows all site's users and tracks their behaviour in real time.
You can view analytics data (total users, user interactions, etc.) directly on your web site instead of signing into a separate portal/site. Note: this view is restricted and will not be displayed to regular users.
Events sometimes go missing. FirstOfficer checks data consistency against Stripe API and uses similar double-entry system than your bookkeeping to make sure that all the payments are processed.
The founder has a BBA in accounting and practical experience from accounting, ensuring that the metrics are calculated right and that they are compatible to use with the numbers from bookkeeping.
You can pull data from third-party source sources like Salesforce or Gmail via their APIs to then associate that data with the user data from Adobe Analytics.
Alexa's ranking is based on users that have installed one of their browser extensions and sites that have installed a tracking script. It's unknown what kind of users are installing the extensions and how big is the sample size (Alexa claims it to be millions).
Generic BI data tool, is absent any necessary features required for analytics of web data. Of course it may work with captured data sets, it just doesn't do anything but data.