What do you use for event tracking?
Hey! What do you use for tracking user events inside your app?
I’m afraid to commit to integrating just any tool; it would help so much to know what you recommend!
Mixpanel? Kissmetrics? Google Analytics? Custom code?
Thanks in advance!
At my dayjob, we use Mixpanel with a combination of FullStory and Google Analytics (we've also tried Hotjar in the past). We've also looked at Heap but it's quite expensive and caters more to enterprise level customers.
If you're a developer already, I'd suggest trying Mixpanel or even GA (though it's interface isn't the greatest). If you're not a developer, consider Heap if it falls within your budget.
Incidentally, I'm building a simple event tracking tool for my own projects. Once it's ready, I'll share it on here but let me know if you'd like to test it out :)
Thanks so much for the reply @sarwech! I will take a look at Mixpanel then.
Please do let me know when you're project is live! Would love to try it out and give you feedback.
Great, will keep you posted :)
Try Segment. Implement once, send events to all major analytics providers!
Thanks! I've heard a ton about Segment; will give that a try.
Mixpanel and Kissmetrics are too high level and inflexible for my needs, so I use Keen.io
However, they've changed a lot since their acquisition and it's probably only a matter of time before the plan I'm on is terminated. I'd love to see an indie hacker make something like what they had a few years ago!
I actually was able to make a deal with Keen for $30/m on their lowest plan. I use it primarily for customer facing analytics cause I haven't found anything that quite does that as well as they do.
Hope you don't mind me asking but how did you make that deal? And what features of theirs are you using?
Thanks :)
Previously their pricing was metered and my usage was pretty low. When they changed their pricing I emailed them and told them that my bill was going to jump from ~$10/mo to $150/mo. They had also mentioned discounts for long term contracts so I asked about that. They were pretty willing to work with me.
I use mostly their event tracking and programmatic access keys. It allowed me to build user facing analytics in less than a day.
That's really insightful. Thanks for the info!
Mind if I emailed you to find out more about your experience with event tracking?
Sure! Glad to help.
I hadn't heard of Keen. What was their focus a few years ago?
I ask because I've struggled to find a simple event tracker app for smaller projects and decided to build something for myself 😅
Their focus was developers and startups. It was free for up to 20k API requests/month (which are used both by sending events and by querying analytics via dashboards you build). After that limit, I believe it was $1/1,000 events and various premium add find like caching specific queries for $5 each.
Now its lowest tier is $150/month, which rules out pretty much all hobbiests and scrappy bootstrappers. They've also rewritten their customer dashboards as a goddawful React app that loads nearly as slowly as IH and requires horizontal scrolling on a browser width of 980 pixels.
So basically, price went way up and UX simultaneously got way worse.
Woah, there's something to be said about companies that change directions like that and put off an entire segment of users. Curious to know what led them down that route (though I have a suspicion).
Out of curiosity, why do you still use it if it's more expensive and the UX isn't great?
Also, thanks for the info! Really helpful :)
I think the changes are all due to the acquiring company's choices. It's not that Keen's team changed strategy so much as new people took over.
I'm still on the old plan. The day they shut it down is the day I start building a replacement. Maybe it would be more work for most their customers, but with my particular skillset, it should only take a weekend to build 100% of what I need.
That's useful to know - thanks :) What are you paying on the old plan?
I use Mixpanel for work and they recently changed their pricing. Funny how the new plans cost more for the same benefits...
Just a few dollars a month so not up to the free limit, but my former employer spent much, much more.
Ah, good to know!
App Center Analytics https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/appcenter/analytics/
... I also use them for app distribution across iOS / Android.
Cool! Will check this out; thanks!
Amplitude
Will check it out! Is it easy to integrate/use?
I like heap analytics because of how easy it is to start, the fact that you get retroactive data analysis, and how there's no events to add to your server side code.
However, it does rely heavily on your HTML/CSS/urls so if those aren't relatively stable, you might run into some issues with keeping reports correct.
How much are they charging you?