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• Wave bytes to buffer

  24 August 2016, by Mohammad Abu Musa

  I am encoding wav input from microphone which comes in four bytes format to ogg format. I think I have a problem shifting the bytes to the correct format here is the code I am using

  To explain more I get the audio frames from Google Chrome where I get data as const8 and channels, and samples. data field is always in 4 bytes format.

  I copy the data to a vector of type int16_t then I loop uninterleave samples which I think I am doing wrong. my question is how can I make sure the data is formatted correctly for ogg encoder to handle them correctly?

  void EncoderInstance::OnGetBuffer(int32_t result, pp::AudioBuffer buffer) {
  
      if (result != PP_OK)
  
        return;
  
  
  
      assert(buffer.GetSampleSize() == PP_AUDIOBUFFER_SAMPLESIZE_16_BITS);
  
      const char* data = static_cast<const>(buffer.GetDataBuffer());
  
      uint32_t channels = buffer.GetNumberOfChannels();
  
      uint32_t samples = buffer.GetNumberOfSamples() / channels;
  
  
  
      if (channel_count_ != channels || sample_count_ != samples) {
  
        channel_count_ = channels;
  
        sample_count_ = samples;
  
  
  
        samples_.resize(sample_count_ * channel_count_);
  
        // Try (+ 5) to ensure that we pick up a new set of samples between each
  
        // timer-generated repaint.
  
        timer_interval_ = (sample_count_ * 1000) / buffer.GetSampleRate() + 5;
  
        // Start the timer for the first buffer.
  
        if (first_buffer_) {
  
          first_buffer_ = false;
  
          ScheduleNextTimer();
  
        }
  
      }
  
  
  
      if(is_audio_recording &amp;&amp; is_audio_header_written_)
  
      {
  
          memcpy(samples_.data(), data,
  
              sample_count_ * channel_count_ * sizeof(int16_t));
  
  
  
          float **buffer=vorbis_analysis_buffer(&amp;vd,samples);
  
  
  
          /* uninterleave samples */
  
          for(i=0;i4;i++)
  
          {
  
              buffer[0][i]=((samples_.at(i*4+1)&lt;&lt;8)|
  
                        (0x00ff&amp;(int16_t)samples_.at(i*4)))/32768.f;
  
              buffer[1][i]=((samples_.at(i*4+3)&lt;&lt;8)|
  
                        (0x00ff&amp;(int16_t)samples_.at(i*4+2)))/32768.f;
  
          }
  
  
  
          vorbis_analysis_wrote(&amp;vd,i);
  
  
  
          while(vorbis_analysis_blockout(&amp;vd,&amp;vb)==1){
  
  
  
            /* analysis, assume we want to use bitrate management */
  
            vorbis_analysis(&amp;vb,NULL);
  
            vorbis_bitrate_addblock(&amp;vb);
  
  
  
            while(vorbis_bitrate_flushpacket(&amp;vd,&amp;op)){
  
  
  
              /* weld the packet into the bitstream */
  
              ogg_stream_packetin(&amp;os,&amp;op);
  
  
  
              /* write out pages (if any) */
  
              while(!eos){
  
                int result=ogg_stream_pageout(&amp;os,&amp;og);
  
                if(result==0)break;
  
                glb_app_thread.message_loop().PostWork(callback_factory_.NewCallback(&amp;EncoderInstance::writeAudioHeader));
  
                if(ogg_page_eos(&amp;og))eos=1;
  
              }
  
            }
  
          }
  
  
  
  
  
      }
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
      audio_track_.RecycleBuffer(buffer);
  
      audio_track_.GetBuffer(callback_factory_.NewCallbackWithOutput(
  
          &amp;EncoderInstance::OnGetBuffer));
  
  
  
  }
  
  </const>

• Turn insights into action with the best marketing analytics tools

  20 August, by Joe

  Behind every great marketing team is a marketing analytics platform that collects performance data and identifies ways to improve. 

  But with hundreds of tools to choose from in a market valued at over $5.6 billion, how can you find the best platform that offers cross-channel tracking and advanced analysis while staying on the right side of privacy laws?

  We’re here to help. 

  In this article, let’s review seven of the top marketing analytics tools, highlighting their standout features, pricing, and common community critiques. You’ll learn why choosing the right tool is crucial and what factors to consider when making a decision. 

  What are marketing analytics tools?

  Marketing analytics tools capture and analyse data from various marketing channels, such as your website, social media profiles, and paid ad campaigns. 

  Marketers use these platforms to find ways to optimise campaigns and drive more conversions. Marketing attribution tools, for example, measure marketing effectiveness and help marketers understand which channels drive the most conversions. As a result, they can optimise budgets, allocating more money to the most effective channels. 

  

  Multi-Channel conversion attribution in Matomo
  (Image Source)

  Marketers can also reduce friction from the customer journey. Behavioural analytics tools like heatmaps and session recordings help marketing teams understand what’s stopping users from converting and run experiments to increase conversion rates. 

  Marketers can use an all-in-one analytics tool or a platform-specific alternative. Some analytics only track your social media efforts, for example. Others, like Matomo, let you track web visitors, paid ad performance, SEO data and attribute conversions from multiple campaigns. 

  The features and capabilities of marketing analytics tools can also vary by industry. For example, financial marketing analytics platforms will prioritise compliance and data security, while e-commerce teams focus on user behaviour analysis. Advanced tools now leverage machine learning to predict trends and automate insights, making them indispensable for data-driven decision-making.

  7 of the best marketing analytics tools

  With numerous marketing analytics platforms to choose from, it can be challenging to determine the best one for your business. 

  We’ve done the hard work, though. Below you’ll find reviews of seven of the leading tools, why they’re great and what customers say about them.

  1. Matomo

  Matomo Analytics is a leading ethical open-source marketing analytics platform that powers over a million websites in more than 190+ countries.

  

  Main dashboard in Matomo
  (Image Source)

  Why Matomo: Matomo empowers organisations to get the insights they need without compromising user privacy. Businesses can significantly reduce the amount of personal identifiable information they collect and comply with privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA. At the same time, they can use visitor logs to track the entire customer journey, assess the value of marketing channels using multi-touch attribution and analyse visitor behaviour using heatmaps and session recordings.

  Standout features include multi-touch attribution, visitor logs, goal tracking, custom reports, e-commerce tools, form analytics, tag manager, Google Analytics Importer, heatmaps and session recordings. 

  Integrations: Matomo integrates with more than 100 content management systems, e-commerce platforms and frameworks, including WordPress, Cloudflare, Magento, Google Ads, Drupal, WooCommerce and Wix.

  Strengths:

  • 100% accurate, unsampled data
  • Privacy-focused marketing analytics
  • Complete data ownership 
  • Open-source software 
  • Self-hosting and cloud-based options
  • A built-in GDPR Manager

  Common community critiques:

  • Non-technical users can experience a learning curve with some of the platform’s more advanced features
  • Premium features are proprietary

  Pricing: Matomo On-Premise is free to use. Matomo Cloud costs $23 per month and comes with a 21-day free trial (no credit card required).

  2. Heap by Contentsquare

  Heap by Contentsquare is a digital insights platform that gives businesses a near-real-time understanding of their users’ digital journeys.

  

  Demo dashboard in Heap
  (Image Source)

  Why Heap: Heap helps businesses paint a complete picture of their customers. It automatically records every user interaction (clicks, page views, form submissions and more) without manual event tagging to give marketers access to every metric and allow for retroactive analysis. 

  Standout features include data science tools that identify customer friction, journey analysis, session replays, heatmaps, pre-built dashboards and customer cohort analysis.

  Strengths:

  • Automatic event tracking eliminates the need for manual tagging, saving time and reducing implementation errors.
  • Setting up Heap is easy with a single code snippet. You don’t need advanced technical skills.
  • Real-time reporting and live data feeds help marketers quickly spot opportunities and issues. 

  Common community critiques:

  • The volume of data capture can create more noise than signal, which clouds analysis
  • Users can find the platform’s interface unintuitive
  • Businesses can accidentally collect personally identifiable information (PII) if they don’t configure the platform correctly

  Pricing: Heap has a limited free plan for up to 10,000 monthly sessions. Pricing for Growth, Pro and Premier plans is available upon request. 

  3. Mixpanel

  Mixpanel is a product and marketing analytics platform that helps SaaS and mobile marketers track user retention and engagement. 

  

  Product metrics dashboard in Mixpanel
  (Image Source)

  Why Mixpanel: Unlike traditional analytics tools that focus on pageviews and sessions, Mixpanel uses event-based analytics to track, analyse, and optimise user actions. It also has AI-powered predictive analytics that help marketers identify trends and proactively address churn. 

  Standout features include predictive analytics, funnel analysis, GA4 migration, A/B testing and real-time reports

  Strengths:

  • Intuitive dashboards and reports make Mixpanel accessible for non-technical users
  • Extensive integrations ensure seamless data flow across your tech stack
  • Advanced cohort analysis and customer segmentation support targeting and personalisation efforts

  Common community critiques:

  • The wide range of features means there’s a steep learning curve for new users
  • Pricing rises quickly for enterprise users
  • Event tracking can be difficult to set up

  Pricing: Mixpanel has a free forever plan with limited features. Premium plans give you one million monthly events free and then charge $.00028 per event after that.

  4. Funnel

  Funnel is a low-code marketing data platform that automates the collection and transformation of marketing data from hundreds of sources. 

  

  Performance marketing dashboard in Funnel
  (Image source)

  Why Funnel: Funnel is the ideal choice for marketers operating across dozens of different channels. It helps you gain a holistic view of marketing performance by pulling in data from over 500 sources, cleansing and visualising it.

  Standout features include a vast number of integration partners, automated data collection and transformation, two-year data storage and custom integrations.

  Strengths:

  • Low-code setup makes Funnel accessible to anyone
  • Highly responsive customer support
  • Custom metrics for personalised reporting

  Common community critiques:

  • The visualisation features are fairly basic. Marketers often need to use other tools like Tableau.
  • The platform has a steep learning curve
  • Delays can occur when processing data from third-party sources

  Pricing: Available upon request

  5. HubSpot

  HubSpot is a comprehensive analytics platform that helps marketers improve every stage of the buyer’s journey. Detailed insights and robust automation capabilities let marketers manage campaigns, track leads and optimise customer experiences. 

  

  Marketing dashboard in HubSpot
  (Image Source)

  Why HubSpot: HubSpot’s all-in-one platform is ideal for marketing and sales teams that want to paint a complete picture of their combined efforts. Analytics features let marketers track visitors and campaign performance, while automation tools nurture prospects and turn visitors into MQLs.

  Standout features include an easy-to-use dashboard, marketing automation, A/B testing and pre-made reports. 

  Strengths:

  • A very intuitive dashboard makes it easy for users of all abilities to navigate
  • Powerful automation features help marketers save time
  • There’s strong customer support and a large community of certified partners

  Common community critiques:

  • Pricing is expensive and increases quickly 
  • Engagement tracking is less granular than dedicated behavioural analytics tools
  • The wide range of features can lead to analysis paralysis

  Pricing: Marketing Hub Professional starts at $800 per month. Marketing Hub Enterprise starts from $3,600 per month.

  6. Whatagraph

  Whatagraph is a marketing analytics and automated reporting platform that helps agencies and in-house teams turn complex, multi-channel marketing data into visually easy-to-understand reports.

  

  Web analytics report in Whatagraph
  (Image Source)

  Why Whatagraph: Whatagraph is a great choice for companies that prioritise data visualisation. It lets users combine data from over 50 sources into customisable dashboards and reports. There are plenty of ready-made templates as well as a drag-and-drop interface in case you want to create your own.

  Standout features include direct integration with 50+ data sources, data blending across different channels, digital ad spend tracking and automated report creation.

  Strengths:

  • A very intuitive and user-friendly interface that lets anyone start building reports immediately
  • Visually appealing reports make it easy to share insights with stakeholders
  • Highly responsive support team

  Common community critiques:

  • No freemium pricing
  • It can take users time to get to grips with Whatagraph’s wide range of features
  • It lacks native integrations for some platforms

  Pricing: Available on request

  7. Google Analytics

  Google Analytics offers two analytics platforms: GA4 and GA360. GA4 is Google’s free analytics solution you’re probably familiar with. GA360 is the premium, enterprise-level version of GA4. It’s built for large organisations with complex analytics needs and high data volumes.

  

  Home page in GA4
  (Image Source)

  Why Google: GA4 is a well-known and widely used analytics platform. It’s free, familiar to most people and has plenty of online resources to help if you get stuck. However, it doesn’t protect user privacy, uses data sampling and lacks advanced features like behavioural analytics. 

  GA360 users can configure the platform to be more privacy-friendly, but there are still better (and cheaper) privacy-friendly alternatives.

  Standout features include event-based tracking, cross-platform tracking, audience segmentation and real-time reporting.

  Strengths:

  • GA4 is free to use
  • There’s no shortage of online guides
  • Cross-platform tracking helps you get a better view of your visitors 

  Common community critiques:

  • Not privacy focused or GDPR-compliant
  • Data sampling muddles insights
  • Both GA4 and GA360 look and are very different from Universal Analytics

  Pricing: GA4 is free to use. GA360 pricing is available on request

  What are the benefits of marketing analytics tools

  Research by Supermetrics reveals that marketing teams are using 230% more data than they did in 2020. 

  Analytics tools are the primary means of generating marketing data, but they have other uses as well. Here are four reasons every department needs a comprehensive analytics platform:

  • Track marketing efforts. Marketing analytics offers a unified view of all your campaigns across channels — from paid ads and social media to email and organic search. By consolidating data from multiple sources, these platforms help marketers monitor campaign performance in real time and prove campaign effectiveness to stakeholders. 
    
  • Improve customer understanding. Analytics platforms that have built-in behavioural tracking capabilities like heatmaps and session recordings help marketers generate qualitative and quantitative data that reveals how users interact with your site, what content resonates and where friction points occur.
    
  • Optimise web and marketing experiences. Marketing is a game of continuous improvement. Analytics platforms help marketing teams attribute conversions to specific campaigns, refine user journeys with A/B testing and improve the overall experience. 
    
  • Drive more conversions. Ultimately, the goal of marketing analytics is to increase conversions, whether that means sales, sign-ups or other events. Performance insights help marketers fine-tune their strategies, target high-value segments, and craft campaigns that move prospects down the funnel more efficiently. In a world where marketing budgets are falling by 15% year-on-year, it’s important to squeeze every drop of ROI from your campaigns. 

  Top features to look for in a marketing analytics tool

  With so many platforms to choose from, picking the right analytics tool can be a challenge. 

  Make it easier for yourself by looking for a tool that offers features to enhance your insights while ensuring your business remains compliant with data privacy regulations. 

  Advanced analytics features

  Don’t settle for a simple web analytics tool or try to juggle different analytics platforms for each channel. Instead, choose a single tool that provides a range of advanced analytics features, including the following:

  • Marketing attribution
  • Cohort analysis
  • Session recordings and heatmaps
  • Ecommerce analytics
  • SEO metrics

  By doing so, you’ll get everything you need from a single platform. This will keep costs down and make managing marketing data much easier.

  Data visualisation

  A great marketing analytics tool will offer customizable dashboards and reports that marketers can use to make sense of complex data. Look for:

  • Drag-and-drop interfaces
  • Pre-built templates
  • Detailed visitor profiles

  Data visualisation not only aids decision-making but also helps communicate results clearly to non-technical team members and executives.

  Near-real-time reporting

  Many platforms will claim to offer real-time reporting. But that’s rarely possible. Instead, choose tools with near-real-time reporting that help marketers measure the impact of campaigns as quickly as possible. 

  Matomo, for example, offers a Visits in Real-time Report that lets you see the flow of visitors on your site and shows how many people visited in the last 30 minutes and 24 hours. 

  

  Visits Overview in Matomo

  The report refreshes every 5 seconds to display new visits and tracks a range of visitor attributes, including country, operating system, referrer, time spent on site and whether they are a new or returning visitor. 

  Data security and privacy

  Data privacy should be a top priority for modern marketers. Employing ethical analytics and data practices will mean you don’t have to annoy users with cookie banners. But it also improves trust and minimises legal risk.

  Choose analytics tools that are transparent about data collection, offer robust privacy controls, and comply with regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Features such as anonymised tracking, customisable consent banners and secure data storage help protect both your business and your customers.

  Matomo has all of these features and more, protecting your visitors’ privacy in a dozen different ways. 

  100% data ownership and no sampling

  A lot of analytics platforms don’t let you own or properly use your data. Data sampling — where tools only analyse a portion of your data — is a particular problem in Google Analytics. It clouds insights, meaning marketers make decisions based on guesses, not facts. 

  Who owns your data matters, too. When you use a platform like Google Analytics, you give permission for Google to use your customers’ data for advertising purposes. 

  Instead of trading your customers’ data for free analytics, use a platform that gives you 100% ownership of your data. Matomo does this in a couple of ways:

  • Matomo On-Premise offers 100% data ownership, as it’s hosted on your own servers. You choose where to store it, and we cannot access it. 
    
  • Matomo Analytics for WordPress provides a self-hosted WordPress-specific option that offers the benefits of On-Premise without the technical setup.
    
  • Matomo Cloud subscriptions are governed by our Terms, which state that you own all rights, titles and interests in your users’ data. In other words, we can’t sell it to third parties or claim ownership. 

  While Matomo products may change, our commitment to privacy never will. You’ll always be able to self-host Matomo for free. 

  	Matomo	Heap	Mixpanel	Funnel	HubSpot	Whatagraph	Google Analytics
  Privacy/GDPR-friendly	✔️
  Open-source	✔️
  Self-hosting option	✔️
  Multi-touch attribution	✔️
  Heatmaps & session recordings	✔️	✔️	⚠️¹
  Goal tracking	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️
  Custom reports	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️
  E-commerce tracking	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️
  Tag manager	✔️		✔️	✔️
  GA importer	✔️
  Real-time reporting	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	⚠️²	✔️
  Predictive analytics		✔️
  A/B testing	✔️		✔️
  Marketing automation					✔️
  Visualisation / dashboards	✔️	✔️	✔️	⚠️³	✔️	✔️	✔️
  Automated reporting						✔️
  Free plan available	✔️	✔️	✔️		✔️

  Trust Matomo for comprehensive marketing analytics

  The right analytics platform empowers marketers to track campaigns across channels, gain deep insights into customer behaviour, optimise user experiences and ultimately drive more conversions. 

  If you care about collecting data while respecting your users’ privacy, a tool like Matomo is the way to go. Try Matomo free for 21 days. No credit card required.

• Six Best Amplitude Alternatives

  10 December 2024, by Daniel Crough

  Product analytics is big business. Gone are the days when we could only guess what customers were doing with our products or services. Now, we can track, visualise, and analyse how they interact with them and, with that, constantly improve and optimise. 

  The problem is that many product analytics tools are expensive and complicated — especially for smaller businesses. They’re also packed with functionality more attuned to the needs of massive companies. 

  Amplitude is such a tool. It’s brilliant and it has all the bells and whistles that you’ll probably never need. Fortunately, there are alternatives. In this guide, we’ll explore the best of those alternatives and, along the way, provide the insight you’ll need to select the best analytics tool for your organisation. 

  Amplitude: a brief overview

  To set the stage, it makes sense to understand exactly what Amplitude offers. It’s a real-time data analytics tool for tracking user actions and gaining insight into engagement, retention, and revenue drivers. It helps you analyse that data and find answers to questions about what happened, why it happened, and what to do next.

  However, as good as Amplitude is, it has some significant disadvantages. While it does offer data export functionality, that seems deliberately restricted. It allows data exports for specific events, but it’s not possible to export complete data sets to manipulate or format in another tool. Even pulling it into a CSV file has a 10,000-row limit. There is an API, but not many third-party integration options.

  Getting data in can also be a problem. Amplitude requires manual tags on events that must be tracked for analysis, which can leave holes in the data if every possible subsequent action isn’t tagged. That’s a time-consuming exercise, and it’s made worse because those tags will have to be updated every time the website or app is updated. 

  As good as it is, it can also be overwhelming because it’s stacked with features that can create confusion for novice or inexperienced analysts. It’s also expensive. There is a freemium plan that limits functionality and events. Still, when an organisation wants to upgrade for additional functionality or to analyse more events, the step up to the paid plan is massive.

  Lastly, Amplitude has made some strides towards being a web analytics option, but it lacks some basic functionality that may frustrate people who are trying to see the full picture from web to app.

  Snapshot of Amplitude alternatives

  So, in place of Amplitude, what product analytics tools are available that won’t break the bank and still provide the functionality needed to improve your product? The good news is that there are literally hundreds of alternatives, and we’ve picked out six of the best.

  1. Matomo – Best privacy-focused web and mobile analytics
  2. Mixpanel – Best for product analytics
  3. Google Analytics – Best free option
  4. Adobe Analytics – Best for predictive analytics
  5. Umami – Best lightweight tool for product analytics
  6. Heap – Best for automatic user data capture

  A more detailed analysis of the Amplitude alternatives

  Now, let’s dive deeper into each of the six Amplitude alternatives. We’ll cover standout features, integrations, pricing, use cases and community critiques. By the end, you’ll know which analytics tool can help optimise website and app performance to grow your business.

  1. Matomo – Best privacy-friendly web and app analytics

  Privacy is a big concern these days, especially for organisations with a presence in the European Union (EU). Unlike other analytics tools, Matomo ensures you comply with privacy laws and regulations, like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

  Matomo helps businesses get the insights they need without compromising user privacy. It’s also one of the few self-hosted tools, ensuring data never has to leave your site.

  Matomo is open-source, which is also rare in this class of tools. That means it’s available for anyone to adapt and customise as they wish. Everything you need to build custom APIs is there.

  

  Its most useful capabilities include visitor logs and session recordings to trace the entire customer journey, spot drop-off points, and fine-tune sales funnels. The platform also comes with heatmaps and A/B testing tools. Heatmaps provide a useful visual representation of your data, while A/B testing allows for more informed, data-driven decisions.

  Despite its range of features, many reviewers laud Matomo’s user interface for its simplicity and user-friendliness. 

  Why Matomo: Matomo is an excellent alternative because it fills in the gaps where Amplitude comes up short, like with cookieless tracking. Also, while Amplitude focuses mainly on behavioural analytics, Matomo offers both behavioural and traditional analytics, which allows more profound insight into your data. Furthermore, Matomo fully complies with the strictest privacy regulations worldwide, including GDPR, LGPD, and HIPAA.

  Standout features include multi-touch attribution, visits log, content engagement, ecommerce, customer segments, event tracking, goal tracking, custom dimensions, custom reports, automated email reports, tag manager, sessions recordings, roll-up reporting that can pull data from multiple websites or mobile apps, Google Analytics importer, Matomo tag manager, comprehensive visitor tracking, heatmaps, and more.

  Integrations with 100+ technologies, including Cloudflare, WordPress, Magento, Google Ads, Drupal, WooCommerce, Vue, SharePoint and Wix.

  Pricing is free for Matomo On-Premise and $23 per month for Matomo Cloud, which comes with a 21-day free trial (no credit card required).

  Strengths

  • Privacy focused
  • Cookieless consent banners
  • 100% accurate, unsampled data
  • Open-source code 
  • Complete data ownership (no sharing with third parties)
  • Self-hosting and cloud-based options
  • Built-in GDPR Manager
  • Custom alerts, white labelling, dashboards and reports

  Community critiques 

  • Premium features are expensive and proprietary
  • Learning curve for non-technical users

  2. Mixpanel – Best for product analytics

  Mixpanel is a dedicated product analytics tool. It tracks and analyses customer interactions with a product across different platforms and helps optimise digital products to improve the user experience. It works with real-time data and can provide answers from customer and revenue data in seconds.

  It also presents data visualisations to show how customers interact with products.

  

  Mixpanel allows you to play around filters and views to reveal and chart some useful customer trends. (Image source)

  Why Mixpanel: One of the strengths of this platform is the ability to test hypotheses. Need to test an ambitious idea? Mixpanel data can do it with real user analytics. That allows you to make data-driven decisions to find the best path forward.

  Standout features include automatic funnel segment analysis, behavioural segmentation, cohort segmentation, collaboration support, customisable dashboards, data pipelines, filtered data views, SQL queries, warehouse connectors and a wide range of pre-built integrations.

  Integrations available include Appcues, AppsFlyer, AWS, Databox, Figma, Google Cloud, Hotjar, HubSpot, Intercom, Integromat, MailChimp, Microsoft Azure, Segment, Slack, Statsig, VWO, Userpilot, WebEngage, Zapier, ZOH) and dozens of others.

  Pricing starts with a freemium plan valid for up to 20 million events per month. The growth plan is affordable at $25 per month and adds features like no-code data transformations and data pipeline add-ons. The enterprise version runs at a monthly cost of $833 and provides the full suite of features and services and premium support.

  There’s a caveat. Those prices only allow up to 1,000 Monthly Tracked Users (MTUs), calculated based on the number of visitors that perform a qualifying event each month. Beyond that, MTU plans start at $20,000 per year.

  Strengths

  • User behaviour and interaction tracking
  • Unlimited cohort segmentation capabilities
  • Drop-off analysis showing where users get stuck
  • A/B testing capabilities

  Community critiques 

  • Expensive enterprise features
  • Extensive setup and configuration requirements

  3. Google Analytics 4 – Best free web analytics tool

  The first thing to know about Google Analytics 4 is that it’s a web analytics tool. In other words, it tracks sessions, not user behaviours in app environments. It can provide details on how people found your website and how they go there, but it doesn’t offer much detail on how people use your product. 

  There is also an enterprise version, Google Analytics 360, which is not free. We’ve broken down the differences between the two versions elsewhere.

  

  GA4’s audience overview shows visitors, sessions, session lengths, bounce rates, and user engagement data. (Image source)

   

  Why Google Analytics: It’s great for gauging the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, tracking goal completions (purchases, cart additions, etc.) and spotting trends and patterns in user engagement.

  Standout features include built-in automation, customisable conversion goals, data drill-down functionality, detailed web acquisition metrics, media spend ROI calculations and out-of-the-box web analytics reporting.

  Integrations include all major CRM platforms, CallRail, DoubleClick DCM, Facebook, Hootsuite, Marketo, Shopify, VWO, WordPress, Zapier and Zendesk, among many others.

  Pricing is free for the basic version (Google Analytics 4) and scales based on features and data volume. The advanced features (in Google Analytics 360) are pitched at enterprises, and pricing is custom.

  Strengths

  • Free to start
  • Multiple website management
  • Traffic source details
  • Up-to-date traffic data

  Community critiques 

  • Steep learning curve 
  • Data sampling

  4. Adobe Analytics – Best for predictive analytics

  A fully configured Adobe Analytics implementation is the Swiss army knife of analytics tools. It begins with web analytics, adds product analytics, and then wraps it up nicely with predictive analytics.

  Unlike all the Amplitude alternatives here, there’s no free version. Adobe Analytics has a complicated pricing matrix with options like website analytics, marketing analytics, attribution, and predictive analytics. It also has a wide range of customisation options that will appeal to large businesses. But for smaller organisations, it may all be a bit too much.

  Mixpanel allows you to play around filters and views to reveal and chart some useful customer trends. (Image source)

  

  Adobe Analytics’ cross-channel attribution ties actions from different channels into a single customer journey. (Image source)

   

  Why Adobe Analytics: For current Adobe customers, this is a logical next step. Either way, Adobe Analytics can combine, evaluate, and analyse data from any part of the customer journey. It analyses that data with predictive intelligence to provide insights to enhance customer experiences.

   

  Standout features include AI-powered prediction analysis, attribution analysis, multi-channel data collection, segmentation and detailed customer journey analytics, product analytics and web analytics.

   

  Integrations are available through the Adobe Experience Cloud Exchange. Adobe Analytics also supports data exchange with brands such as BrightEdge, Branch.io, Google Ads, Hootsuite, Invoca, Salesforce and over 200 other integrations.

   

  Pricing starts at $500 monthly, but prospective customers are encouraged to contact the company for a needs-based quotation.

   

  Strengths

  • Drag-and-drop interface
  • Flexible segmentation 
  • Easy-to-create conversion funnels
  • Threshold-based alerts and notifications

  Community critiques 

  • No free version
  • Lack of technical support
  • Steep learning curve

  5. Umami – Best lightweight tool for web analytics

  The second of our open-source analytics solutions is Umami, a favourite in the software development community. Like Matomo, it’s a powerful and privacy-focused alternative that offers complete data control and respects user privacy. It’s also available as a cloud-based freemium plan or as a self-hosted solution.

   

  

  Umami’s dashboard reveals the busiest times of day and which pages are visited when.(Image source)

   

  Why Umami: Unami has a clear and simple user interface (UI) that lets you measure important metrics such as page visits, referrers, and user agents. It also features event tracking, although some reviewers complain that it’s quite limited.

  Standout features can be summed up in five words: privacy, simplicity, lightweight, real-time, and open-source. Unami’s UI is clean, intuitive and modern, and it doesn’t slow down your website. 

  Integrations include plugins for VuePress, Gatsby, Craft CMS, Docusaurus, WordPress and Publii, and a module for Nuxt. Unami’s API communicates with Javascript, PHP Laravel and Python.

  Pricing is free for up to 100k monthly events and three websites, but with limited support and data retention restrictions. The Pro plan costs $20 a month and gives you unlimited websites and team members, a million events (plus $0.00002 for each event over that), five years of data and email support. Their Enterprise plan is priced custom.

  Strengths

  • Freemium plan
  • Open-source
  • Lightweight 

  Community critiques 

  • Limited support options
  • Data retention restrictions
  • No funnel functionality

  6. Heap – Best for automatic data capture

  Product analytics with a twist is a good description of Heap. It features event auto-capture to track user interactions across all touchpoints in the user journey. This lets you fully understand how and why customers engage with your product and website. 

  Using a single Javascript snippet, Heap automatically collects data on everything users do, including how they got to your website. It also helps identify how different cohorts engage with your product, providing the critical insights teams need to boost conversion rates.

  

  Heap’s journeys feature combines funnel and path analysis. (Image source)

   

  Why Heap: The auto-capture functionality solves a major shortcoming of many product analytics tools — manual tracking. Instead of having to set up manual tags on events, Heap automatically captures all data on user activity from the start. 

  Standout features include event auto-capture, session replay, heatmaps, segments (or cohorts) and journeys, the last of which combines the functions of funnel and path analysis tools into a single feature.

  Integrations include AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure, major CRM platforms, Snowflake and many other data manipulation platforms.

  Pricing is quote-based across all payment tiers. There is also a free plan and a 14-day free trial.

  Strengths

  • Session replay
  • Heatmaps 
  • User segmentation
  • Simple setup 
  • Event auto-capture 

  Community critiques 

  • No A/B testing functionality
  • No GDPR compliance support

  Choosing the best solution for your team

  When selecting a tool, it’s crucial to understand how product analytics and web analytics solutions differ. 

  Product analytics tools track users or accounts and record the features they use, the funnels they move through, and the cohorts they’re part of. Web analytics tools focus more on sessions than users because they’re interested in data that can help improve website usage. 

  Some tools combine product and web analytics to do both of these jobs.

  Area of focus

  Product analytics tools track user behaviour within SaaS- or app-based products. They’re helpful for analysing features, user journeys, engagement metrics, product development and iteration. 

  Web analytics tools analyse web traffic, user demographics, and traffic sources. They’re most often used for marketing and SEO insights.

  Level of detail

  Product analytics tools provide in-depth tracking and analysis of user interactions, feature usage, and cohort analysis.

  Web analytics tools provide broader data on page views, bounce rates, and conversion tracking to analyse overall site performance.

  Whatever tools you try, your first step should be to search for reviews online to see what people who’ve used them think about them. There are some great review sites you can try. See what people are saying on Capterra, G2, Gartner Peer Insights, or TrustRadius. 

  Use Matomo to power your web and app analytics

  Web and product analytics is a competitive field, and there are many other tools worth considering. This list is a small cross-section of what’s available.

  That said, if you have concerns about privacy and costs, consider choosing Matomo. Start your 21-day free trial today.

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