Companies have sharpened their focus on their greatest source of learning— their customers. Modern enterprises rely heavily on customer tracking software to improve their understanding of users.
Customer or user tracking software allows product and marketing teams to closely study a customer’s journey, from their preferences at each touchpoint to when and how they drop off the sales funnel.
Companies then use this data to make key business decisions, build a new feature, or revise their messaging.
In fact, ‘user-led’ product development is a widely practiced phenomenon today that helps businesses personalize customer relationships and become more customer-centric.
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat is User Tracking?
User tracking is the process of collecting, storing, and analyzing user behavior data. As users navigate your app or website, you can use tools to track their behavior.
Typically, user tracking tools collect information related to:
- Web analytics, which includes page views, acquisitions channels, and session durations
- Behavior analytics, including user sentiments, user engagement, and product experience
- User testing like usability research, user interviews, and audience management
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Should You Look for in User Tracking Software?
Like most software, your buying decision largely depends on your requirements and business goals. However, there are some basics you must look for.
- Features: First, figure out what user analytics you’d like to track—website performance, product experience, user behavior, or all. Based on this, choose a tool that fulfills your specific requirements
- Accuracy: Inaccurate or misleading reports lead to incorrect decisions. Conduct your due diligence on the accuracy of the data generated by the user-tracking software
- Data privacy: Ensure that the software you choose respects user privacy, complies with all applicable data protection regulations, anonymizes data, and asks for user consent
- Scalability: Choose software that will scale as your business grows and cope with changing needs
- Usability: The last thing you need is a clunky, outdated UI or complicated navigation. Test if the user testing platform is intuitive and easy to set up
- APIs and Integrations: Ensure your chosen tool integrates smoothly with the rest of your tech stack
Summarize this article for me pleaseThe 10 Best User Tracking Software to Use
While several user tracking tools are on the market today, here’s our rundown of the 10 best ones.
1. Dynatrace
Dynatrace’s USP is how well it integrates user tracking with your BizOps and DevOps tools.
This solution provides IT teams with infrastructure monitoring, application testing, security, and code-level observability. It also empowers business teams with real-time user monitoring, user behavior analytics, and feature adoption analytics.
Dynatrace best features
- Monitor your infrastructure, apps, servers, and users from one place
- Analyze user behavior across locations, browsers, and device types
- Track business KPIs, revenue, and trends with contextual user data
- Trace the root cause of threats and incidents
Dynatrace limitations
- Many new users report a steep learning curve
- Lacks out-of-the-box customization options
- Some users may find it expensive
Dynatrace pricing
- Real user monitoring: $0.00225 per session
Dynatrace ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.5/5 (1200+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.5/5 (45+ reviews)
2. Datadog
Datadog is a cloud-based, user activity monitoring service that provides complete visibility into how users interact with your website and app on the front and back.
Built for IT managers and engineers, Datadog provides real user and infrastructure monitoring. It helps businesses gain insights into user behavior while giving them a secure experience at the same time.
Datadog also allows you to run simulations to test user journeys across browsers to catch bugs and glitches.
Datadog best features
- Monitor user behavior in real-time on both browsers and mobile devices
- Visualize data with custom charts, dashboards, and reports
- Get alerts on all incidents and create automated responses
- Identify the root cause of core web vitals like slow loading speed
Datadog limitations
- Lack of depth and granularity in reports
- Mobile application testing is limited
- The platform is relatively expensive
- Issues with customer support
Datadog pricing
- RUM: Starts at $1.50 per 1000 sessions per month
- RUM and Session Replay: Starts at $1.80 per 1000 sessions per month
Datadog ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.3/5 (430+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.5/5 (230+ reviews)
3. Solarwinds Security Event Manager
Solarwinds Security Event Manager is not your typical user-tracking software built for product or marketing teams. Instead, it’s a DevOps tool designed for IT managers with a strong focus on security.
Solarwinds Security Event Manager tracks user behavior to analyze suspicious behavior or threats to your website or online business’s infrastructure. To use it, you need some amount of technical and coding know-how.
Apart from this, Solarwinds Security Event Manager also helps you track employee activity on company assets and devices.
Solarwinds best features
- Automate threat detection and response when common alarms are triggered
- Use built-in report templates to comply with regulations like PCI DSS, GLBA, SOX, NERC CIP, and HIPAA
- Analyze your IT infrastructure for security mishaps and vulnerabilities
Solarwinds limitations
- Creating alerts can be a tedious process
- Requires people with technical skillsets or IT managers for implementation
- Limited storage options
Solarwinds pricing
- Custom pricing
Solarwinds ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.0/5 (65+ reviews)
- Capterra: Not enough reviews
4. Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is a user behavior analytics platform that offers businesses a comprehensive set of features to help track individual user behavior. It is one of the only platforms focusing on the correlation between user behavior and revenue.
As an industry veteran, Kissmetrics provides a variety of business-friendly reports like funnels, activity breakdown by revenue, and customer journey paths.
Kissmetrics best features
- Gain insights into your revenue, customer lifetime value, and churn rate
- Track feature usage, active users, page views, refunds, and more
- Use raw data and SQL queries to examine user behavior closely
- Analyze feature workflows and pinpoint where users are dropping off
Kissmetrics limitations
- Summarizing data and creating reports can be challenging
- Customizations can be complex
- The platform tends to load slowly when dealing with a large number of events
Kissmetrics pricing
- Pay as you go: Starts at $0.0025 per event
- Silver: $199 per month
- Gold: $499 per month
- Platinum: Custom pricing
Kissmetrics ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.1/5 (160+ reviews)
- Capterra: Not enough reviews
5. Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is an easy-to-use website visitor tracking software with features like traffic reports, recordings, and behavior reports. The platform has limited functionalities nested inside a clean user interface, which makes it a good option for beginners and small businesses.
An exciting feature in Crazy Egg is ‘Snapshots,’ which gives you five reports for each landing page—heatmaps, scroll maps, confetti reports, overlay reports, and list reports. These snapshots can be compared, exported, and shared with other team members.
Crazy Egg best features
- Get all the basic website analytics functionalities like heatmaps, scroll maps, and error tracking
- Understand user behavior like click tracking, frustration tracking, and mouse movement
- Analyze clickable elements like links, buttons, and even forms
Crazy Egg limitations
- The reporting feature is quite limited
- Relatively expensive
Crazy Egg pricing
- Basic: $29 per month
- Standard: $49 per month
- Plus: $99 per month
- Pro: $249 per month
Crazy Egg ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.2/5 (108 reviews)
- Capterra: 4.5/5 (82 reviews)
6. Matomo
Matomo (formerly Piwik) is an open-source alternative to popular web analytics tools like Google Analytics and Hotjar for website visitor tracking. Matomo is also one of the only website user-tracking tools that provide an on-premise solution and 100% data ownership.
As one of the few open-source website visitor tracking tools, Matomo users can join a thriving community of marketers and developers to answer questions and provide advice about customer analytics and market research.
Matomo best features
- Use heatmaps, funnels, ad analytics, and more to understand your website performance better
- Own 100% of the data collected on the platform
- Get accurate reports with no data sampling
- Gain insight into how website visitors are responding to your audio and video content
Matomo limitations
- Does not integrate with Google Marketing Platforms
- Matamo’s on-premise tool is complicated
- Customizations and data visualization can be challenging
Matomo pricing
- On-Premise: Free
- Cloud: $19 per month
Matomo ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.2/5 (85+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.8/5 (55+ reviews)
7. AppDynamics
Primarily used for infrastructure monitoring, AppDynamics offers a few key user-tracking features. These include website usage reports, end-user browser and mobile monitoring, and conversion rates.
The visitor tracking tool can also be used as an employee monitoring software in internal use cases.
AppDynamics also offers synthetic monitoring for troubleshooting glitches and bugs, allowing users to monitor their websites from the back end to ensure a smooth and seamless user experience.
AppDynamics best features
- Monitor your website, app, and infrastructure in one platform
- Optimize your digital experience with in-depth customer journey insights
- Get real-time updates on incident reports
- Follow what’s happening on the frontend and backend of your website
AppDynamics limitations
- Requires JavaScript knowledge and platform training to operate
- Most functionalities are unnecessary for small and medium-sized companies
- Can get expensive over time
AppDynamics pricing
- Infrastructure monitoring: $6/month per CPU Core
- Premium: $6/month per CPU Core
- Enterprise: $33/month per CPU Core
- Enterprise for SAP: $50/month per CPU Core
- Real user monitoring: $0.06/month per 1000 tokens
- Cisco secure application: $13.75/month per CPU Core
AppDynamics ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.3/5 (370+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.6/5 (30+ reviews)
8. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the most widely known website user-tracking software globally, and with good reason. Part of the Google Marketing Platform, it comes with a simple, intuitive UI and, most importantly, is completely free.
As a user activity monitoring software, Google Analytics tracks real-time and historical data on user behavior and can help marketers understand a customer’s journey through the website.
Key features include traffic monitoring (overall visits, individual page views, unique visitors), audience analysis (demographics, interests, devices used), conversion tracking (acquisition channel, form submissions, clicks), and more.
Google Analytics also provides custom reports and integrations with the rest of the Google suite for marketers to manage all their data from one customer database platform.
Google Analytics best features
- Create custom dashboards to monitor specific business goals and KPIs
- Get started in a matter of minutes with codeless tracking
- Refine messaging, ads, and your website using audience insights from Google Analytics
- Integrate with BigQuery for free and create predictive audiences using ML
Google Analytics limitations
- No access to raw user data
- No customer support in the Free plan
- Data sampling can lead to inaccuracies
- The paid plan is very expensive
Google Analytics pricing
- Free
- Google Analytics 360: $12,500 per month (or $150,000 per year)
Google Analytics ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.5/5 (6250+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.7/5 (7760+ reviews)
9. Hotjar
Hotjar is a product experience insights platform that provides an in-depth analysis of user behavior.
Hotjar’s visitor tracking software includes visitor tracking tools like heatmaps and session recordings, feedback tools like forms and surveys, and user research tools like audience management and usability testing.
Businesses typically use Hotjar and Google Analytics to add context to audience behavior and simplify decision-making processes.
For example, session recordings from Hotjar can be used to understand why a particular landing page has a high bounce rate in Google Analytics.
Hotjar best features
- Analyze your website’s performance with heatmaps and scroll percentages
- Document important video snippets or findings from experiments
- Use session recordings to retrace your users’ journey and pinpoint roadblocks
- Monitor behavioral trends with custom reports
Hotjar limitations
- The free plan offers limited page views and session recordings that can be limiting for websites with high-traffic
- Heatmap data is aggregated and not available in real-time
- Implementation and setting up experiments is a time-consuming process
Hotjar pricing
- Basic: Free forever
- Plus: $32 per month
- Business: $80 per month
- Scale: $171 per month
Hotjar ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.3/5 (300+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.6/5 (500+ reviews)
10. UserTesting
Unlike some of the other user tracking tools on this list, UserTesting is built on the premise of ‘Human Insights’—where users proactively look for an audience to test their product or service rather than just monitoring inbound visitors.
UserTesting can help product teams (UX researchers, product managers, and UI designers) test and validate a prototype or feature. Marketing teams, on the other hand, can understand an audience’s response to their website and messaging.
UserTesting boasts a sizable audience network that businesses can use to test their products and websites. However, if that doesn’t work, they can onboard their own audience to the platform.
UserTesting also provides other value-added services like UX strategy and consulting, accessibility testing, and more.
UserTesting best features
- Run usability tests and get feedback from real humans
- Onboard and manage custom audiences on the platform
- Leverage AI to better understand user sentiment or anomalies in user behavior during testing
- Use the built-in integrations to sync your user research data with the rest of your tech stack
UserTesting limitations
- Depending on your company’s niche, it might be difficult to get a relevant audience to test your product
- Some users find the UI to be somewhat non-intuitive
- The pricing could be too steep for small and medium-sized companies, especially those with multiple user personas
UserTesting pricing
- Free trial on request
- Essentials: Custom pricing
- Advanced: Custom pricing
- Ultimate: Custom pricing
UserTesting ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.5/5 (650+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.4/5 (120+ reviews)
Summarize this article for me pleaseOther CRM tools
So, now that you’ve picked one or more user tracking tools and set up your expectations, the next step is bridging the gap between user behavior, analytics, and customer relationship management (CRM).
CRM tools integrate with your tracking software and help you segment customers, personalize communication, perform predictive experiments, and even score your leads.
CRM tools like ClickUp bring you closer to your customers and help you develop a more sophisticated understanding of your user base.
ClickUp
While ClickUp is widely used for its product management features, its marketing and CRM capabilities make it a preferred choice for marketers and product managers.
Here are some ways that ClickUp will transform decision-making and fuel business growth:
- Sync your website analytics goals with ClickUP CRM for a fuller picture of your customer journey
- Create a task in ClickUp whenever an incident or bug is reported in your software testing experiment
- Prioritize feature development in ClickUp based on user data analytics like sentiment, feedback, and navigation patterns
- Add critical findings to your ClickUp docs and workplace so your team will be able to access them at any time
Apart from this, marketers also use ClickUp AI to generate content briefs based on user feedback, and web analytics or generate visually pleasing analytics reports to share with the C-suite.
ClickUp best features
- Organize customer data and automate customer outreach with robust CRM solutions and CRM templates
- Leverage ClickUp AI to brainstorm campaign ideas, create content briefs, and more
- Integrate ClickUp with your user analytics tools and create a unified analytics database
- Use custom workflows, tags, and filters to segment and define your user analytics insights
- Collaborate with your team in real-time or sync with emails, whiteboards, and collaborative docs
- Customize your customer reports with 50+ dashboard widgets
ClickUp limitations
- As ClickUp offers several features for a variety of use cases, right from productivity to marketing to customer relationship management, the learning curve can be steep
- ClickUp AI is only available on paid plans
ClickUp pricing
- Free Forever
- Unlimited: $7/month per user
- Business: $12/month per user
- Enterprise: Contact for pricing
- ClickUp AI: Available on all paid plans for $5 per Workspace member per month
ClickUp ratings and reviews:
- G2: 4.7/5 (9200+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.6/5 (3900+ reviews)
- Gartner: 4.3/5 (130+ reviews)
Summarize this article for me pleaseImprove Customer Relationships, Drive Top and Bottom Line Growth
Customer tracking software provides first-hand insights into what your users are experiencing on your website or product. Product and marketing teams will then use that information to build solutions that delight customers and keep them returning for more.
Any user analytics tools mentioned in this list will deepen your understanding of user behavior. Integrate the user tracking software of your choice with ClickUp to unlock new frontiers of customer-centricity.
Sign up to ClickUp for free to learn more!
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