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Ask HN: How do you track user behavior/engagement inside of your SaaS app?

by markfer on 1/26/18, 12:11 AM with 2 comments

I'm curious if anyone has a way to track the behaviors (time spent in app, pages they frequent, steps they're taking, etc) of applicants INSIDE of their SaaS app? I don't mean hotjar :)
  • by troydavis on 1/26/18, 1:40 AM

    A few popular choices for this: Mixpanel, Amplitude, Heap Analytics, KISSmetrics.

    Some factors that may push you to one more than the other:

    * What are the 3-5 things you’re currently most interested in concluding? Some products will make certain reports/conclusions much easier than others.

    * Will your events be generated exclusively from the server (major benefits: not subject to content blocking, can be augmented with other data only the server has), or only from clients(s), or both?

    * Do you have one important ID (typically a user ID), or 2 (typically a customer/company ID and a user ID), or many?

    * Once you’re able to measure the basics, what do you want to do with it? Some examples: cohort analysis; contextual in-app messaging with a product like Intercom; exporting the data to a BI tool like Tableau

  • by matchmike1313 on 1/26/18, 12:27 AM

    We use Amplitude right now and absolutely love it! We have a Rails App with a React front-end and we just made a helper to have Amplitude track all actions we deem "important" and spin up a job in our back-end job queue. We also use Google Analytics and Intercom for some higher level stuff.