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