The Best User Behavior Analytics for Your Web or Mobile Product

User behavior is a tough nut to crack. Users are complicated, unexpected, and impatient. As mobile technology improves, users become more skilled and more knowledgeable about their devices and what they want to gain from them. This is good news, but it actually makes mobile app creators’ jobs harder, as it makes it more difficult to understand what users want, why they interact with apps the way they do. User behavior is now so nuanced that we need more than quantitative data to understand it — more than graphs and numerical metrics like MAU/DAU, session length, and retention rates. User behavior analytics must provide answers to deeper questions: not just “what” and “how many” but also “why” and “how”.

Mobile app analytics platforms are adapting to the need and giving app creators innovative new ways to track and understand user behavior. From quantitative to qualitative focused platforms, here are the top user behavior analytics tools (for mobile and web) that can help you survive the beta testing stage and beyond:

User Behavior Analytics Tool #1: Amplitude (Web, Android, iOS)

Amplitude takes this user data and lets app professionals slice and dice their data and find the answers to their questions about user behavior. With Amplitude, you can use the power of behavioral cohorting to understand user behavior trends in your app. Amplitude lets you zoom in on different user cohorts: for example, users who performed a certain action in the past 30 days and were also using a certain device. This helps you decide on the actions that will improve your retention and conversion rates. You can also get customized alerts, observe users as they make through funnels, and collaborate with team members on your Amplitude dashboards.

User Behavior Analytics Tool #2: Appsee (Android, iOS)

Appsee’s unique approach to user behavior analytics lies in its two main features: touch heatmaps and user session recordings. With these two tools, Appsee provides both recordings of user experiences on a single-user level, showing exactly how user interact with the app, and also an aggregate view of users’ gestures on each screen. This means that you don’t need to rely solely on user interviews, feedback, and testing. Instead, you have the power to observe and analyze your users’ actions within the app and understand real user behavior — at any stage of the app’s lifecycle and with no risk of bias. This unique ability allows for deep, actionable insights with just a glance. If users are behaving in a different way than what you expect, you’ll be able to quickly understand the cause, because you’ll see it with your own eyes. No more guesswork!

User Behavior Analytics Tool #3: Mixpanel (iOS, Android, mobile web, web apps)

Mixpanel uses machine learning to drill down into your data and generate immediate insights about your users. Get started by tagging events you want to track on your app, website, or mobile website, and Mixpanel will provide you with automated, ML-generated actionable insights. This is an efficient approach to quantitative user behavior analytics, as Mixpanel uses trillions of data points in its analyses. Mixpanel can also create predictions on user behavior, based on their past actions.

User Behavior Analytics Tool #4: FullStory (web)

FullStory wants to give you the “full story” about your users’ behavior by providing session replay for your website, with a machine-learning based backend that helps you navigate the tool. This makes user behavior analytics for web a piece of cake: you can watch users interacting with your site and catch usability issues that need fixing as soon as they happen. FullStory’s search engine makes it easy to find the sessions most relevant to you, showing you collections of sessions that caused user frustration and “rage clicks”. FullStory also creates “click maps” — interactive maps that show the exact elements on your site where users click the most.

User Behavior Analytics Tool #5: Inspectlet (web)

Inspectlet records your visitors’ interactions with your site with session recordings, every mouse movement, click, and scroll. Inspectlet also provides detailed conversion funnels and even allows you to tag individual users and events. The real magic in Inspectlet’s tool is showing the clicks that didn’t happen: eye tracking heatmaps, which are generated by following the mouse as users move it to read and look for certain features. This adds a unique ability that can reveal a lot of the thought behind user behavior.

User Behavior Analytics Tool #6: Hotjar (web, mobile web)

Hotjar offers heatmaps that track website visitor activity plus user session recordings that really show your visitors’ behavior on your website. Combine this with form analysis and conversion funnels and you have a truly holistic user behavior analytics tool for websites. In case these tools still leave you with unanswered questions about your users and their behavior, Hotjar offers a way to communicate with them directly: with feedback polls, customer surveys, and even a tool for finding user testers. This powerful combo of session recordings and heatmaps makes it possible to leave no stone unturned when trying to understand user behavior.

User Behavior Analytics Tool #7: Lookback (iOS, Android, web, mobile web)

Lookback makes it easy to communicate with your testers and users. Instead of recording just their screens, Lookback lets you set up a video call with your research participants, ask them questions, and see their reactions to your product in real-time. Lookback even records the sessions and uploads them to a cloud-based database for you. You can also use Lookback to enable your participants to test the site or app on their own, with just a simple link. Lookback doesn’t require any special equipment to set up, and guides your users through the installment and testing process without you having to lift a finger.

Summary

As technology gets better and better, user behavior is becoming harder to understand. Luckily, as you can see with these top tools, the analytics market is rising to meet the new and increasing need. From user session recordings to touch heatmaps to action cohorts, there are many tools out there that can help you understand those complicated users, and give them a digital experience that meets their every expectation.

The Best User Behavior Analytics for Your Web or Mobile Product was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.