User Behaviour Tracking on Web and App

All data driven web and mobile applications require tracking of user behaviour on their platforms. And there are numbers of solutions available in the market. In this article, I will write about the solutions I have tried.

Google Analytics is a must have tool for websites. It has good number of features for free and very easy to integrate by using Google Tag Manager. Though it is used by almost every website but usage is at a very surface label. There are plugins to integrate with GA for almost every web framework like Django, Wordpress, Symfony, RoR, Code Igniter, Joomla etc. But plugins will just provide you limited capability in tracking - the page visits and page flows, user acquisition channels, landing pages, time on a page, session duration etc. To get actual benefit and deeper actions of users on react/angular based websites where most of actions are click/touch based, default integration wont work. For this, we need to use event capturing at almost every action of user on most of the pages. Event names should follow a convention and properties of events should be generic. One limitation of GA is that it captures data based on samples and extrapolate it. It sometimes lead to distorted insights for lesser traffic websites or pages when data collection is most important, because you need data capturing of newly launched features specifically for small set of users (A/B testing). Tough sampling rate can be defined but GA will never capture 100% of all requests. For B2B products, where number of users are small, it is very important to track individual user's behaviour to provide best solutions. User level tracking is paid solution on GA and quite costly and startups can not afford it. GA also falls short where we have users who use both mobile app and website and we need integrated behaviour tracking. Despite these short coming, GA is must have but should be supplemented with another solution to dig deeper.

Mixpanel, Amplitude and Localytics are other solutions I have tried. MixPanel gives lots of features but many of them are not free. I found it costly for Indian companies because their pricing is based on number of monthly active users or data events. Amplitude provided better pricing for startups and its free tier is bigger than Mix panel, though Behaviour cohort, data exporting features are paid, hence its usage is limited. Localytics is more than behaviour tracking and provides many marketing tools like in app messaging, SMS and emailers depending on user's behaviour. Its also provided integrated sem user acquisition tracking (FB and AdWords). Again, localytics does not have free tier solution. They provide at max 1 month trial after contract signing. Cost is in the range of $10000 - $15000 for one year paid in monthly instalments for upto 1 lakh MAU. Advantage of Localytics is that we do not need to code for messaging templates, crons for sending communications and trigger points. In initial launch of startups, due to limited bandwidth, coding these things may be time taking and may produce unintended buggy communications. Hence relying on solutions like Localytics for marketing communication may be beneficial. If your app has more 1 million MAUs, pricing of these may be too high and you may prefer coding your own solutions.

So I will suggest following approach -

When you are a startup with upto 5 lakh monthly active users -

GA + localytics (or equivalent depending on how good deal you get. In some cases they discount upto 90%, so bargain hard)

More than 5 Lakh active users -

GA + amplitude/mixpanel + own marketing communication related tools

More than 30 Lakh MAU -

GA + own data capturing infra and tools + own marketing communication related tools for personalised messaging.