KISSmetrics, an analytics startup that wants to help you boost your user acquisition and retention rates by providing a more robust picture of how your customers are using your site, is today announcing “KISSmetrics Experiments.” A la Gmail Labs, Experiments enables KISSmetrics users to access and test out experimental new features and help decide whether they become lasting parts of the product.
The first experiment KISSmetrics unveiled today is a visualization feature that customers can use to view data on how their users interact with their site, web apps, and mobile products. The new experiment expands on its so-called “People Views,” which Jason first covered last year, that essentially allow site administrators to drill down into the way that individual users are browsing and using their sites — as well as their history before they actually signed up for an account.
Among other things, KISSmetrics shows its customers acquisition data for every one of their users, including a timeline feature that lets site administrators see how customer behavior has changed over time, identifying common usage patterns, or viewing the most recent referrers, average time between visits, etc. This timeline feature shows how many times a user made certain actions, when they signed up, how many times they’ve upgraded, viewed their dashboards, and so on — presenting all this data in an intuitive visual format, so that the size of the circle on the timeline corresponds with how many times the customer took action.
As you can see in the above image, when lines connect with these circles, it represents a step-by-step funnel that the customer went through during the sign-up process. KISSmetrics co-founder Neil Patel explains that the experience of his his first company, Crazy Egg, led he and his team to the conclusion that “the future of analytics and customer data will involve interactive visualizations.” Certainly Google Analytics and others have proven that site owners, technically advanced or not, need more complete data on user behavior, especially that which is visual and easy to understand.
Thus, with its new experimental data visualization tool, Patel said that the team wants to make data that is typically boring and difficult to understand simpler, more elegant, and easier to turn into definitive action. Because KISSmetrics provides a full history of a company’s customer interactions, whether they be on the Web, mobile, Facebook apps, or other platforms, Patel thinks KISSmetrics can offer a truly 360-degree view of user behavior.
They have added Experiments to their product, he said, so they can more easily experiment with visualizations like the “Timeline View” above. While there other startups like Mixpanel and RJMetrics that offer “Cohort Reports” and individual user data, the co-founder believes that KISSmetrics is the first to allow customers to view individual user data in a visual format. Most simply offer the traditional data table layout, while KISSmetrics believes it’s going one step further.
Patel said this is the “first of many” experiments and visualizations the startup will be using to try to find the best and most intuitive ways to understand customer data. Having more complete, accurate, and visual representations of the conversion funnel can be a powerful weapon for companies. Being able to measure how many users are dropping off during the signup and onboarding cycle (and where) helps them enhance or correct the facets of each step — and see the impact new features or upgrades are having on their overall site experience. That’s huge.
Because the company took some heat last year for the way they track visitor data, KISSmetrics has updated its user privacy policies, which you can view here.
For more, check out KISSmetrics at home here.
Comment