Choosing analytics solutions for the startup I'm working at has proven to be more daunting than I imagined. There are many services to choose from and it's not immediately obvious how you should choose from the many offerings to get not only complete analytics coverage, but also do so in a way where you can integrate them all to get a complete picture without any mismatch. There is too much marketing speech copy on the sites of many analytics startups to properly evaluate them without wasting time and effort to signup, configure and use each one long enough to understand the value they provide.
Off the top of my head there are services like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, RJMetrics, Omniture, KISSMetrics, Hubspot, GinzaMetrics, Crowdbooster, GoodData, Totango, MailChimp's Analytics 360,Beevolve, SocialBlaze, CoTweet, etc. etc. etc.
Given all the options out there, what are considered the must have analytics solutions for startups? What are people doing about integrating the myriad solutions into something coherent and useful? What are the best tools for bringing in all the data from the different analytics tools you use and displaying them in one place so you can spot phenomena to investigate in more detail?
What are all the different things one should be measuring? Website analytics? Newsletter analytics? Facebook/Twitter/Google+ analytics? Site search analytics? etc.
Are there any specific analytics solutions for developer tools oriented startups (e.g. Meteor, 10Gen, Basho, etc.)
I'm especially interested in hearing from the YC startups, since I figure there maybe a set of analytics tools that are suggested to you guys by the YC partners based on the collective experience of past YC classes.
The more details you can provide the better.
Ash Maurya wrote this great article on actionable metrics: http://www.ashmaurya.com/2010/07/3-rules-to-actionable-metri...
In the end I think it depends on how you want to use the data.
Here are a few things that I find useful:
- calculating your ROI on customers by correlating marketing efforts with key metrics. Google Analytics is good for this as you can basically identify the customer origin with a marketing campaign and how they convert for key metrics.
- full funnel perspective and cohort charts for AARRR metrics (http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2007/09/startup-metrics....). KISS Metrics and Mixpanel are great for this, but I still haven't found anything that does the Cohort diagrams that well.
- experimenting with messaging using A/B testing tools like Visual Web Optimizer (http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/) which has it's own analytics.
- retention email marketing is great with Customer.io (http://customer.io/) but I have fairly limited experience with that.
Other tools include Statsmix (which I think is under-represented); it is pretty good for collecting custom event data.
Once you have the money for it, tools like Pardot are great for marketing overall. We just implemented this so I still don't have much experience with it personally. It's a full marketing automation tool and has other competitors with higher price tags.