In 2013 I’ve written lots of articles around solutions offered by Google: for example, how Google Tag Manager works; or how Google Analytics attribution model comparison tool works. We know Google is not the only player in the analytics market, this year, I’ll start exploring and shared with you what other analytics solutions are available in the market and what’re their killer features. In the last article, I’ve shared how to use the open source analytics software Piwik to conduct log analysis. In this article, I’ll share my trial experience with a paid solution – KISSmetrics.
What is KISSmetrics
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KISSMetrics is a paid analytics platform designed for small and mid-sized companies (according to this Wiki article). I am not sure whether they picked the name because of the acronym – Keep It Simple Stupid, but a first look at the software gives you a sense of simplicity – you won’t find tons of reports or data in the very beginning, but it really depends on what YOU would love to know and to focus. Below I will be briefly explain the installation and configuration I’ve tried, but before that, let’s go through 1 important thing first – the price.
Pricing Scheme
Similar to the UI and the company name, the pricing scheme in my opinion is simple enough:
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Just 3 plans and it counts according to your usage – based on # of events you have per month. For detailed pricing information and what’s included you can see their pricing page.
So what is an event in KISSmetrics?
Key Concept – Events, Metrics, Conversions
An event is basically an user interaction or activity that you care and want to record. It can be simple as seeing a page, putting something into shopping cart, completing a registration , watching a video or doing an in-app purchase. It’s actually something quite similar to the Google Analytics event, but it’s even more important in KISSmetrics, because KISSmetrics will only reports the events that you’ve declared – but not like GA reporting tons of metrics to you.
After you’ve created an event; you will create a metric – which is a quantitative measure of the event. For example, if you create an event ‘putting something in shopping cart’, you can then create a metric called ‘# of cart initialization”; or if you create an event ‘watching a video’, you can create a metric called ‘# of video watched’. Fairly straight forward right?
Finally among these metrics, there should be key ones that represents conversions, just like when you’re setting up Google Analytics goals – for example, somebody has purchased something from your web site.
I’ve summarized the relationship in this simple diagram:
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Installing KISSmetrics
Just go straight to sign up for an account, it will ask you for a simple set up or a more customized setup:
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Let’s take the simpler path first. Take the 5 mins path and install the tracking code as follows:
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Very similar to GA right? I actually implement it using Google Tag Manager:
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Still don’t know what is Google Tag Manager? See my earlier tutorial.
Setting up Event
If you’ve selected the simpler path to create the account, KISSmetrics by default will create 2 basic events for you: visited site and search engine hit. For sure this is not enough, and depends on your business need you may want to track different user interactions. I think KISSmetrics is really good at forcing you to think about what exactly you want to know so that you can focus on those.
For me, for example, I would love to know whether people are following me via the different channels like Twitter, Facebook, Google + by clicking on the social icons I placed on my blog. I can create a new event called ‘follow me’ as follows:
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Basically it says: when someone clicks on those social icons on my blog, an event called ‘Follow me‘ will be triggered. If you’re not sure what does ‘the element’ field means, ask your programmer who build your site; or stay tuned…I will be writing another post shortly to introduce basic HTML concept to marketers.
Setting up Metrics
The next step is to setup a metric. As you can see from the screenshot the metric is not only the count of the event – but for instance, it can be # of visitors who triggered that event, or the time between these events (for example, you can get visitor’s recency by calculating time between the visits event); or if you are tracking event when someone buy something in your site, you can set up metrics like the total # of items bought or the order value, apart from just tracking # of purchase.
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This is very powerful and you can really do your own math to define the metrics that you want. For instance, I can create a metric called ‘average number of visits’ for my visitors like this:
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Define Conversions
After you’ve set up all your events and metrics, it’s time to focus on the conversions. For sure you should have defined what are the conversions for your business, again, it can be different for different business type and business at different stages – for example you’re a new start up that still shaping the offered product, you may want to focus on user engagement; or you’re a well established company, you may be looking at viral metrics that relates to how well you grow your company’s exposure to the public.
Simply define a metric as conversion like the way we did above, and you can calculate the conversion rate as well.
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Result
So this is what I’ve got so far under the Metrics screen:
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Really simple and clear enough right?
Summary
So this is the first taste of KISSmetrics I’ve so far. One thing I appreciate much from them is they proactively collecting feedback from me by sending me a personal email. I actually was asking them for extending my trial period a bit and they immediately extend my trial to 30 days the next day.
My first thought about KISSmetrics – I love its simplicity and flexibility, and I agree that they are really trying to get rid of what we called vanity metrics – data that is not actionable. It forces you to focus on the metrics that are really important, lead you to find your KPI or the OMTM (one metric that matters).
Thought for people who is not familiar with analytics software or need to get data quick and fast, it would be a bit scary for them when they see the metrics screen has no data at all; GA kind of at least ‘give you something’, and maybe GA is more suitable for beginners or people with less experience or resource, also consider KISSmetrics is a paid solution. I still can’t quite compare whether the cost is good or bad since I’ve not been exposed to many paid solutions yet, maybe that’s something I can do later this year.
There’re more killer features like A/B testing and people analysis that can be done in KISSmetrics. And I haven’t touched all the reporting and also properties that are also available in KISSmetrics. In later posts I will try to further explore the functionality as well as how to create meaningful reports, stay tuned!