| It really depends on your business. Are you a b2b? b2c? media outlet? etc... The question is, do you need Web Analytics to analyze your traffic (sources, exits, uniques, etc...), Customer Analytics to analyze your user base (unique customer identification, customer retention...), Mobile Analytics, Server Monitoring, Email Marketing Analytics etc... Google Analytics can be the best free solution out there for general web analytics, it really covers everything you need to know about your "visitors" and it works really well with media outlets, blogs or websites where visitors don't identify themselves. Woopra Customer Analytics (http://www.woopra.com) can be a great solution for you if your visitors identify themselves on your website. Woopra creates a profile for every single visitor on your website and aggregates visits across multiple devices (multiple cookies) under one profile when customers identify themselves. Which reduces the noise dramatically when you're doing reports on unique customers. Most people access your service across multiple devices (home, work, iPad, iPhone etc...) and you don't want to count every visitor multiple times in your reports. Woopra also allows you to leverage your customer data for sales, marketing and support purposes as it builds a complete behavioral profile in real-time as they engage with your website. My personal favorite Woopra feature is the ability to get push notifications whenever any visitor or identified customer fits in a certain category and/or commits one or more specific actions. The other question you need to ask yourself is "Who's going to be using the product?". Products & Services are designed differently for Developers / Product Management, Marketers, Sales, Support... To summarize: Web Analytics is a very generic term now and you're going to have to decide what fits better with your business: A/B Testing:
- Optimizely (Commercial) Customer Analytics (SaaS):
- Woopra (Commercial & Free)
- KISSMetrics (Commercial) Mobile Analytics:
- MixPanel (Commercial & Free)
- Flurry (Free) News & Media Website Analytics:
- Google Analytics (Free)
- Chartbeat (Commercial)
- Clicky (Free & Commercial) Email Marketing Analytics:
- Marketo (Commercial)
- HubSpot (Commercial) Server Monitoring:
- WebMon (Commercial - recently launched)
- NewRelic (Commercial) (Disclosure: I'm founder & CEO of Woopra) |
I agree with you completely. It all depends on the type and stage of business. If all that's needed is analytics, HubSpot is likely overkill.
One quick piece of advice to the OP: Be careful not to spend too much energy analyzing the analytics tool choices. Most startups are better off making a quick decision, and getting back to working on the product.