3 best analytics and user behavior analysis products for startups

Coding Samples

Oct 2

5 min read

Startups often need to build an MVP or a prototype fast in order to launch their product fast to confront their market. When launching a new product and getting users to try it, besides your client's feedback, one of the most valuable assets you have is your users' behavior on the application you built.

In this article, I will show you 3 products that you'll be able to integrate and try very fast and will give you the value and analysis you need to understand your users' needs.

#1 Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the most popular analytics tool used on the web, it currently has around 86.1% of market share among all analytics tools. It gives you detailed analytics about your traffic acquisition, your user engagement, demographics, technologies used to access your website, retention, and also a real-time overview of the traffic you get.

Google Analytics can be integrated as fast as a script tag on your website <head>.

GA integrates very well with Google application environments such as Google Tag Manager, Google Optmize and the Google Search Console.

As Google Analytics is the most popular, many third-party applications support integrations with Google Analytics seamlessly and will make its data super powerful for your business.

#2 Hotjar

Hotjar is my 2nd go-to analytics application. Hotjar is focused on user behavior analysis and provides some feedback features which is what most early-stage startups need to iterate properly in the best conditions.

Hotjar main features:

Heatmaps: Describes precisely where most of your users click and scroll actions on your pages, it gives an in-depth understanding of how your product is used and the potential UI/UX errors you made.
Session recordings: Records your user sessions and anonymize all sensitive data so you can focus on the potential UI/UX mistake some users tend to struggle with.
On-site surveys: Little programmable surveys you can put anywhere on your website to get the answers you need about your product.
Feedback widgets: Fast and efficient widget your users can click on to rate and give comments about their experience using your website.

#3 Sentry

Unlike Google Analytics and Hotjar, Sentry isn't focused on behavioral analytics. Sentry is made for developers to track and get a detailed analysis of errors and the performances of your application.

It is an all-in-one solution to have control over all possible failures of your tech stack.

Sentry gives developer teams superpowers for bug fixing reactivity. When an unexpected error happens on your website, you instantly receive an alert with the detail of the error so you can come up with a solution as fast as possible.

The performance tab will give you highlights of your different routes or API endpoint performances.

Conclusion

Google Analytics, Hotjar, and Sentry are very powerful together, if you consider using one of them, feel free to put them all together to have more powerful control over your product. All of these applications have some super convenient free-tiers to let you run them comfortably (Except for Google Analytics that is completely free to use).