12
21 Comments

Are you using product analytics? (Amplitude, MixPanel, PostHog etc)

I'm looking into using product analytics for my webapp. I already use MetaBase for getting reports out of my database, and I LOVE it.

However, measuring low-level interactions ("how often was this button clicked?") is too much hassle to use the DB. Currently looking at PostHog which does exactly what I want, but is very expensive.

What are you using? What are your experiences

  1. 3

    We are using MixPanel for our feedback tool ruttl, but we are going to switch to PostHog soon, mainly because they offer a session recordings feature and it’s easier to use. That being said below are certain features that we liked about MixPanel.

    1. You can track where your users are coming from and get an idea about what they do with your product or service. if they repeat an action, you get insights regarding that as well.
    2. Marketing funnel feature allows you to find out why your audience isn’t converting into paid users/customers.
    3. You can even segment users based on their activity profiles.

    Hope this helps!

  2. 2

    I've honestly tried almost all of the most known product analytics platforms. It's a mess. The best of them is June, but even with that I'm not super content. A lot of tracked interactions just don't appear in the UI at all, as if they're just... Gone 😅

    1. 2

      Hey Yassine, we've got event tracking now in Squeaky, and they won't disappear from the UI like June 😇 Got funnels and custom dashboards coming early next year too!

      1. 1

        Awesome! Will try it out!

    2. 1

      thanks for the quote 🙏

      if you need some support getting started happy to hop on a quick call:
      https://enzo.chat/

      also agree, it's a mess, hopefully we'll fix that 🤗

    3. 1

      OK, thanks for the tip. Will take a look.

    4. 1

      It's because people block stuff like this. You should be tracking the majority of your events server side.

  3. 1

    We went from Amplitude through Mixpanel and ended up using Posthog self service which was hard to maintain. We switched to Posthog Cloud recently which now does the job and works well.

    I am not sure about pricing, I think a lot of it changed over the last 12 months. Mixpanel looked way too expensive back then but now I see that it's quite fair.

  4. 1

    How many MTU's do you have at the moment?

    I think the question comes down to how much tracking are you willing to do, are you going to add tracking code to each button/interaction click?

    Options
    1 - If you want low effort but just to know every click is tracked you can use heap with auto track enabled. Their free tier isn't as generous, but still a great product.

    2 - If you want a good product with a very generous free tier I would go with MixPanel - but not auto-tracking.

    Personally, I don't think Auto tracking is a good choice and you are better off tracking the customer lifecycle at a higher level with these kinds of tools. You can use other tools such as fullstory or hotjar to track what is going on at a page level.

    What we have at (Hitchd) is

    Good luck!

    1. 1

      Great, thanks for that. I didn't know about Heap.

      Does MTU mean Maximum transmission unit? Why is this relevant?

      1. 1

        MTU's are monthly tracked users.

        Why it's important is for two reasons

        1. If you are tracking your product analytics and analytics from your anonymous /landing pages your MTU's are going to be HIGH given you'll have many users who visit and don't sign up. The advantage here is as you are growing you also want to understand HOW your users are using your product even before they signup. The Cons are that it results in high MTUs

        2. If you are only tracking your users in the application/product, your MTU's will be low and the free tier is plenty on most products for most indie hackers who are still growing.

        This is why I recommend using MixPanel and why I use it personally and migrated from Heap

        MixPanel (free plan) https://mixpanel.com/pricing

        • Gives you 100k MTU's for free
        • Once you need to grow beyond that the price isn't too bad
        • The big pro is you can go with option 1, and track your customer's entire journey, but more importantly also track what people are doing who don't convert.

        Many people say to use different products to track anonymous/ content, but I think there is a lot of power and clarity that you get by treating your application and content as one product (option 1)

        TIP: MixPanel free doesn't let you save many reports, but they use stateful URL's so you can simple create all the reports you want and save them as bookmarks and come back to them at any time.

        TIP2: If you use Segment (esp on the startup plan) or any other decent CDP you can send data server to server to a number of these tools and test them out for yourself to see which one you prefer by only investing in implementing the Segment tracking SDK. When I say Server to Server, I mean Segment's servers to the tools (MP/ Heap / etc) server

        Hope it helps

  5. 1

    I'm a bit biased, but try Squeaky - our Event Tracking functionality is perfect for measuring low-level interactions, and you don't need any tech-expertise. (Also cookieless and no IP tracking, personal data anonymised by default etc, so you don't need annoying consent banners) 🙂

    1. 2

      Cool, thanks for that. The site looks great!

      However, with 183k visitors per month, the price is currently too high for me.

      1. 1

        Hey Caspii, we're changing our pricing shortly so it's not so heavily weighted on monthly visits, we also have a startup program that offers a 50% discount, so maybe it's not as steep as it seems at first glance. I'm sure we could figure something out, let me know if you'd like to plan a short call - even if it doesn't work out I'm curious to learn more about the use case you had in mind as it could help us improve our product offering generally 🙂

  6. 1

    Use Segment, then you can send it to whatever destination you want, including Mixpanel and Amplitude.

    1. 1

      One thing I have never understood: why use segment at all? What are the advantages of adding an extra layer?

      1. 1

        It's not an extra layer, it's more like the opposite where you have 1 tool for tracking events (Segment) and send it out to other platforms (Slack, MixPanel, Amplitude etc.).

        It also has the benefit that if you ever want to switch to e.g. a competitor to Amplitude you don't have to change all the event stuff, you can just remove Amplitude as a destination, and add the competitor as a destination.

    1. 1

      Cool, thank you.

  7. 1

    What about dumping your clicks into Firebase/Firestore and data transfer (streaming) them into BigQuery to run SQL on top of it? With free Looker Studio it's relatively simple to build any reports you might need, and starting a day reading fresh reports in your inbox is quite an addictive habit.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 16 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments