Kissmetrics Reviews: 4.1/5 — Solid Choice

Ease of use, excellent documentation, many opportunities to customize, excellent reporting tools.

Can be overwhelming for someone new to analytics and data analysis. Not as useful for a small business - price and volume of data.

The business problem was a combination of lead generation and analyzing how people were using the site.

It's great to see the actual details progression of a user or account, across time, sessions and actions. The funnels are also very easy to use, with the ability to drill into another dimension across the funnel. eg: start checkout > billing/payment > completed order - dim1 ---> - dim2 ---> etc... dimensions are called properties. Their data model is very simple, it's a property attribute model - eg {color:red} and you can call any event easily through the javascript API.

If you can't get the detailed events and properties implemented, the granular path analysis is not very good. They have somewhat limited data extraction capabilities so data auditing can be limited. Support is pretty good when you need it, but it's largerly a self service model. One thing that routinely confuses people is the attribution settings when breaking down funnels. You can breakdown by the - first property ever - last property (maybe they call it most recent) then there's the issue of people vs hits vs sessions. often times conversion looks different than GA because KM focuses on unique users, rather than some notion of dividing actions or events by sessions. Events are also able to be counted once per unique user or once per occurrence. As long as you're aware of these config issues you'll be OK...but keep them on your radar.

Understating granular product usage. We realized that there's a big behavioral difference between power users and lighter weight users. Hence, the averages you see don't really apply to anybody.

KISSmetrics really is a great thing. I use it on a daily basis, and it informs nearly everything I do in terms of outreach to users. Have they used my company's product? How much? When? Where have they traveled on my website? There is just a wealth of information that you can sift through, user by user...with customized tracking events so you are getting granular data on exactly what you want.

The searching service is notoriously slow. It's hard to enjoy having this as a vital cog in my workflow because the slow speeds are simply annoying sometimes. And the problem is algorithmic. They can absolutely speed things on their end with better code.

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The ability to track and create reports for marketing and in-product interactions. We use Kissmetrics regularly for A/B testing and helps combine website conversions with in-product conversions.

The reports can be very slow sometimes. It seems to have gotten better since the product switched owners. I wish the data exports happened automatically instead of going to your email.

A/B testing to improve conversion rates on the website. Analyze the conversion funnel from visit to registration to payment. Analyze in-product user metrics.

Como elementos interesantes de este funnel de conversión, no se trata de un funnel predefinido, sino de un entorno de libre configuración de secuencias de eventos a partir de la identificación previa de hitos (ej. visualización de producto, términos y condiciones, etc.), con independencia de su localización final en los informes

A ello añade Kissmetrics una integración con la gestión de campañas de Google Analytics (y esto es algo que tenemos que explorar, porque sospecho que se limitará a una capacidad para hacer uso de los parámetros UTM… pronto añadiré un comentario al respecto).

En cuanto al seguimiento de visitantes, muchos estarán contentos con el nivel de abstracción usado por esta herramienta, que pasa a hablarnos de personas. Y aquí podemos entrar en terreno espinoso, como sabéis. En fin, pronto sabremos más. Por ahora cabe mencionar que Kissmetrics se presenta como una alternativa de bajo coste a quienes no encuentren el tiempo para sacar provecho de soluciones más complejas y costosas.

I love the ability to take the consumer on a "bunny trail" through your website. It allows you to control their pathway and see content that you find most relevant on your site

The set up isn't extremely intuitive. It takes a few minutes to grasp the difference between the "conversion page link" and the "destination link." I think that process could be a little simpler. Although, I love the ability to customize the bubbles with brand colors, verbiage & shape (to an extent).

I am solving the problem of conversion & 24/7 service. All sites in this day and age are using a technology that allows the consumer to feel like they are being serviced even if there is no one available or working. A benefit I've realized is a lot of people allow the pop up to lead them right from the home page which gets them looking at the testimonials which builds your credibility and helps convert.

kissmetrics has a lot of useful info, Thue always lets us know about upcoming webinar. Every time I attend I take a lot of information. We have used some of the helpful tactics in our own planning.

I don't have anything I dislike about Kissmetrics

Marketing

The quick ability to segment populations and reports based on the properties you need.

The interface and UX are a bit confusing and cumbersome but that seems to be improving rapidly.

Paid attribution, demand gen funnel analysis, data for a/b testing

I like that Kissmetrics has so many customizable options. The support is also amazing! Patrick was very responsive and helpful.

Sometimes the process of pulling data can feel a bit manual.

We are very interested in finding conversion rates.

easy API, easy to add data, live feature is awesome

not easy to do reports on metadata fields

trying to see what features are used most to build new products

I like the ability to report on AB tests we are running within our product, and the responsiveness by the Support & Product teams.

I am currently only using KM for AB test reports, so I don't have a wide area of experience. Specifically with AB testing, I was a little shocked by the minimal current functionality and lack of API integration availability. To KM's credit, they quickly worked with me and my business needs to tweak the API and allow my dev team to mold KM's data into a dashboard that greatly cut's down reporting/analytics time.

See above. Using KM for reporting on our AB testing data as we scale up our tests. It's very important that we get quick, accurate data that allows us to view all of our tests' data at a glance and with a proper statistical significance (& proper sample size) calculation.

We signed up and used their free trial. During the trial I was able to see what a powerful tool this could be for someone looking to find holes in their funnel. The interface in the backend is gorgeous and easy to navigate and the reporting is amazing. I loved how specific you could get, we were actually able to track our users down to an individual user to see what event the triggered or what device they were using. This sort of information is crucial when your trying to define your funnel.

There's a couple things I wish KISSmetrics had. I understand that this tool is different from HubSpot, but I wish I had more ways to automate events that were in the future. I also wish that it had some more documentation on setting up your account and how to use all of the events and properties. We were relatively new to this mindset when we signed up so some of these things were tough to figure out for us.

KISSmetrics can solve for some many different problems. We were trying to use it to see if there were any holes in our funnel and see how our visitors would interact with our site.

The ability to track funnels and page performance for a site and product app

The requirement to create each specific funnel you want to see, instead of automatically seeing all paths

Website user abandonment rates and improving conversion rates.

Kiss metrics is great for funnels, it's really their strong point. They also do a good job of keeping analysis defined to cohorts, which is a subtle but important point a lot of other tools miss.

I think the UI needs work, navigation is not intuitive to me and I wonder if others have similar problems.

Funnel optimization is our main goal and KISS has allowed us to really dig into our data and figure out where the bottlenecks are.

I like how I'm able to see and drill down to an individual level such as where the visitor came from and usage patterns.

In order to create new events or properties I have to have development place something on the back end. I can't just create new events based on classes it seems.

What are our users doing? How are they using the product? KISSMetrics has helped me identify certain users that I've reached out to in order to get valuable feedback on user experience.

I really like the added power of the new filters that were added recently. Also, I love using ABTest reports along with cohort reports.

'Huge' users that happen when different users log in on the same computer and get aliased together. No way to undo it

ABTests on new user features, registration and payment flows.

KISSmetrics provides detailed access to all of our app usage data, combined with our marketing data. This blended approach helps us not only understand how our customers use our app, but also which marketing channels bring in our best long-term customers.

Some reports can be confusing at first and others can take substantial time to master.

KISSmetrics helps us understand how our customers use our app, which features they use, and which features drive long-term subscriptions. App usage data, combined with financial data, combined with marketing data helps us make key decisions about marketing spend and development priorities.

KISSMetrics has many tools, the ones that we use and love the most are the funnel reports, cohort reports, revenue reports, and A/B testing reports. If you're running an e-commerce business, KISSMetrics's funnel reports are essential to monitor and optimize your funnels to figure out which steps users are leaking from. KISSMetrics makes it easy to generate reports as well as to keep them organized. For customer acquisition, KISSMetrics's cohort reports makes it easy to follow your users and analyze their behavior far after their initial purchase. This analysis could provide you with valuable insight about your customers and their purchasing behavior. If you also use Optimizely, KISSMetrics is a great complementary tool, because if you forget to add a Goal in Optimizely, you can track it via KISSMetrics as long as it is added as an event. I primarily use KISSMetrics to track my Optimizely experiments. If you advertise online, KISSMetrics gives a great overview of how much each user from a specific channel is worth, and this can help you guide your advertising spending for that channel.

In KISSMetrics, you have to create an event for each thing you want to track, so if you create a new page and forget to create a tracking event for that page, you will not have any traffic data for that page until you create the event. This is in stark contrast to Google Analytics which collects data about everything about your site and lets you sift through it afterwards. In addition, KISSMetrics lacks many key segmentation and granular detail analysis that would provide much greater insight to data, such as mobile/desktop segmentation or location segmentation. You basically can only go one layer deep with your data.

For e-commerce companies, KISSMetrics is essential for plugging in leaks in your funnel. It is also great for analyzing A/B tests. KISSMetrics gives us key insights about the people who visit our website and what they are doing once they are on, and this data allows us to further improve our website to provide the best customer experience possible. KISSMetrics has been essential in helping grow our site significantly in the past year.

It's the only tool that I haven't had to customize to the nth degree that connects the actions of people from our website to our product. This means I understand what people did/are doing on my website as well as what they did/are doing in my product. I'm not a super technical guy so being able to build funnels and reports without much coding is awesome. You really have no idea where the barriers are in your registration and adoption process until you start using KISSmetrics.

- No IP filtering to block internal users. This drives me crazy because our traffic and conversions volume isn't large enough to marginalize a few "test" registrations. - Still need some technical chops to use. But hey it's infinitely easier than GA. - Data isn't real-time. You have to wait 4-6 hours, sometimes more, for data to show up.

We've only been using it a month, but I the 30 seconds it took me to build my registration funnel vs. the weeks it took me to build the same thing in GA was worth it.

KISSmetrics makes it easier for us to visualize the impacts of business initiatives in cohorts.

We've had considerable challenges configuring KISSmetrics for the unique aspects of our business, specifically user vs account level activity.

We're trying to better understand the flow of our customers -- from creating initial trials, to activating those trials, through conversion to paid, ongoing engagement and churn.

The ability to truely get the data you need.

The interface and its slowness. This is the reason I moved away.

We're trying to increase conversions and understand where are customers are coming from and what revenue is coming from what source.

Easy to use tools and interface to define user flows and funnels. Also has a handy dashboard so you can see what events have been triggered in the last day, week, or month. Also, I found the ability to drill down into an individual user's interactions and history with our site helpful. Something that cannot easily be done with Google Analytics.

You have to know your flows in advance and label the buttons/pages in advance as an "event". When you are a startup company that does not have a ton of time to do robust web-tracking management and a ton of visitors, you may find this frustrating. There were several occasions where I would have liked to have been tracking a button/feature, but since I did not set it up as an "event" on KissMetrics, it did not track it.

We are looking at figuring out how people use our site, what are the most popular features, and where are people "dropping off".

The drill down, getting to the bottom line of each user. The AB reports The Power Reports The team The price

The lack of flexibility when it comes to segmentation The lack of aggregation for certain properties Difficult to pivot data, and lack of consistency between power reports and funnel reports

We had no idea if our features where being used or not! Also, some key events in our funnel were missing and Kissmetrics makes it easy to choose which category a user belongs to at the time of an event. Their UI and frequent releases improve our experience in the right direction. Also, Kissmetrics helped us a ton with their new A/B test platform which is quite simple to use Finally, the ability to filter out users of one site out of a different one using KM identities gives us a better accuracy on our traffic numbers

The cohort reports are one of the most useful elements. Daily reports are nice too.

The process for organizing and displaying the dashboard is atrocious. Also the path reports let you track forward but not backward from a step.

Tracking our funnel.

It's better than GA for campaign tagging

Support looks like it was written for developers. It's hard to understand for a marketer.

Tracking marketing success. We've got about half as far as we'd like to with the ability to report on our campaigns.

Very easy to use compared to most advanced web analytics packages. Funnel optimization is really straightforward and it is quite easy to understand what to do in order to increase both engagement and conversions. Custom rules and custom URLs with specific parameters are easy to track. Dimensions are also very easy to add and configure. From a reporting standpoint, Kissmetrics' dashboard and custom reports are easy to build, their UI makes data manipulation easy and user friendly. The built-in API is easy to work with and Kiss Metrics provides a solid documentation and customer support. Overall Kiss Metrics complements Google Analytics nicely and at an affordable price point for small and mid-size companies.

A/B testing capabilities are available via Optimizely for landing pages but I would rather use a really powerful A/B and MVT testing platfrom. I'll rather use the Omniture Suite or another powrful optimization tool for that. Kissmetrics is used by Google Analytics users essentially. However, Kissmetrics solely rely on unique visitors instead of visits and events. It can make things a bit confusing when you try to connect the dots.

A great tool to reduce abandonment at each step of your purchasing/booking funnel. Kissmetrics is also something I use for performance optimization. It is nice debugger showing all your server calls and their impact on your website in a comprehensive way. Kissmetrics has also been helpful for confirming the nature of segment groups that are more likely to convert.

Great way to track which mediums are the most effective for promoting a campaign, including which ones produced the most valuable leads. Great and responsive account managers.

Some technical difficulties with reports.

How to track where the highest quality leads are coming from.

The ease of use and functionality really made it a great tool. The design of the site is also really delightful, I can't stand really flashy or overwhelming sites, but KISSmetrics really made it feel like I was using a quality, no-frills tool.

Sometimes found myself getting confused with specifics. Took some time to get used to the placement of the tools and how to navigate at first, I'm a huge fan of tutorials, though!

We were looking at how to reach individual users and how they were engaging with content online

Kissmetrics are a great way to see how people are finding and interacting with your site. The funnels are easier to set up and I'd recommend it if you have a budget.

In the end, we decide to get better at Google Analytics because it was free and our startup had budget constraints. I still prefer KISSmetrics.

Where in our onboarding process people where leaving our site.

Kissmetrics is a very intuitive tool - very easy to use, no prior skills needed. Many options are predefined, so its no The implementation was also quite easy. In addition, we received great support from one of the representatives. As a bottom line, the implementation and deployment of the tool went on really fast and smoothly.

We tried Kissmetrics 2 years ago, and as mentioned before, its seemed like a great tool in terms of implementation. However, it couldn't meet our requirement. As our business is purely online, and we have a huge amount of traffic across over 10 countries, we need a very customizable solution. We have plenty of special events, custom variables and custom dimensions which we need to track on a site and on a group level. We also need a very detailed and robust segmentation and proper user tracking. This wasn't available 2 years ago.

As mentioned before, our business is a purely online company - the biggest classifieds in UAE and Egypt, with presence in around 10 countries in the Middle East and North Africa. We need to track the individual users from the point of first contact (via paid marketing, social media, WOM etc), through they content consumption (on our campaign or blog sites), to final conversion to posting an ad or sending a lead. We need to be able to follow the complete customer life cycle and to be able at any time to build personas, to segment on special demographics or behavioral characteristics and to contact those users via CRM.