📂 Everything you need to know about analytics tools

​

​

​

Today's newsletter is proudly supported by Conversion Factory 🎉

I started Conversion Factory to help startups go from a nice-to-have to a must-have. We're the only product marketing agency accessible on a subscription. That's right — no quotes, no scopes, no billable hours, no contracts. Pay us a flat fee (we have 100% transparent pricing on our site) and we'll fly through your backlog. Follow the link to check out our example work and learn more about how we can help.

Check out Conversion Factory →

​

​

The following is a document we share with our clients at Conversion Factory to help them do an audit of their analytics setup and give them directional advice about how to assemble an analytics stack that meets their needs.

Revenue is the byproduct of conversions.

Whether it’s converting someone from a stranger to a known supporter, to an email subscriber, a paying customer, and finally a loyal evangelist, it all comes down to conversion.

Without tracking these it is exponentially harder to know what marketing efforts worked and what didn’t.

We don’t want to overcomplicate this, so here are the six main things we measure:

Primary conversions

• Product signups
• Demo requests

Secondary conversions

• Newsletter signups
• Lead magnet form submissions

Metrics to monitor

• Visitor-to-lead conversion rate
• Lead-to-customer conversion rate

Now let’s get into the how and talk about the tech stack to start getting the right data in front of us.

There are five primary types of tools you need:

1. CDP or Tag Manager
2. Marketing Analytics
3. Product Analytics
4. Marketing Attribution
5. SEO

Let’s dive into each one.

CDP or Tag Manager

Recommendations include Segment, Rudderstack, Jitsu (open source), and Google Tag Manager.

If you use both Segment and Google Tag Manager, we recommend installing Segment first and then deploying GTM through it for certain tools where Segment isn’t supported natively (e.g. Google Analytics 4).

Marketing Analytics

Recommendations include Google Analytics 4, Fathom, Plausible, and Crazy Egg.

The biggest thing for SaaS companies is to make sure you have cross-domain tracking set up. For example, in GA4, you would set up separate Data Streams for your marketing domain and app domain (and mobile apps if applicable), this way all data is consolidated to the same property. e.g.

• yoursaas.com
• app.yoursaas.com
• Android app
• iOS app

Each tool has its strengths and weaknesses. For instance, Google Analytics 4 is known to miss some conversion data, while Plausible offers better raw tracking but has a limited attribution window due to privacy compliance.

Every platform has their own flavor of event tracking setup. Here’s an example from Fathom.

Consider using Crazy Egg for event tracking, enabling the monitoring of website interactions without manual definitions. Crazy Egg offers out of the box: heatmaps, recordings, A/B testing, funnel tracking, error tracking, and goal tracking – all with one installation script.

Product Analytics

Recommendations include June, Mixpanel, Amplitude, PostHog, Heap.

The simplest and most modern solution is June, which has a generous free plan as well. The biggest selling point of June is **company-level analytics** which rolls up user interactions under a single company to see how an account is engaging with you vs disparate users.

The most important product analytics metrics to track are:

• Onboarding success
• Usage of value metrics that influence pricing levers
• Individual feature usage

Marketing Attribution

Recommendations include HockeyStack, RevGems, and Dreamdata.

HockeyStack and RevGems connect directly to Stripe, which works great for product-led sales models. Dreamdata caters to more sales-led models where deal size varies.

You can also write some simple JavaScript to grab the first known referral source, store it in a cookie, and then append it to a customer’s profile upon signup.

SEO

Recommendations include Google Search Console and Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.

The two work hand in hand as Ahrefs Webmaster Tools imports from Google Search Console. Google Search Console is a great resource for indexing, discovering page performance issues, and tracking which keywords that bring traffic. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is great for discovering ways to improve on-page SEO and tracking ranking movements.

—Corey

​