Design your way

On today’s competitive market, entrepreneurship is a game of chance.

What is a lifetime opportunity for some happens to be a stepping stone for others, and sort of an intimidating roller-coaster you can never be totally prepared for.

The ups, downs, and foremost unexpected turns will make you frightened and excited at a time, and no matter how many tries you give it or how other people feel, you will always have a different story to tell.

At the same time, the risk and the unpredictability is what makes most entrepreneurs jump on the start-up wagon. Startup analytics, on the positive side, comforts and inspires most of the frightened ones, and gives this seemingly shaking decision a rational background.

Do you still feel intimidated? Well, you’re in your full right to do so, with so many gray areas and unanswered questions. Worst yet, many of our ‘how to start a business’ searches end up result in ‘lean start-ups’ and ‘why do business fail’, but it won’t hurt to wrap up some info that will flip the coin.

Here are some analytics for start-ups you may find useful:

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is used by many website owners in order to examine visitors’ interaction with their content, and reveal valuable hints that can optimize your performance at a minimal cost. For instance, CrazyEgg offers Confetti and Heatmaps that are very simple to use, and yet help understands what users are actually looking for.

Take Heatmaps as an example: in technical terms, they represent visual graphs of where people have clicked the most. Translated to content optimization terms, this means distinguishing attractive from unattractive posts and focusing on the first to get even more clicks.

The system will also help segment clicks by search terms, referral sources, and more.

Another distinctive advantage of having of having valuable traffic sources revealed is being able to discover similar ones at little to no effort at all.

Geckoboard

Geckoboard is another data visualisation platform that brings all sources under the same roof, and segments important metrics independently. You will appreciate its neat and friendly dashboard, built up from over 120 different services to ensure no key data will be missing from your view.

Geckoboard will also provide instant access to statistics, and foster an open-minded and advanced data culture that helps you make smarter decisions.

Kissmetrics

It is more than simple: if you know what your customers need, you will also know how to develop you business. KISSmetrics will make this happen with real people examinations rather than hypothetical guesses, as it reveals all essential data including locations, demographics, age, purchase history, and preferences.

Able to track all geographies and devices, KISSmetrics will most certainly enhance the performance of your website or application.

KISSmetrics was developed by a team of creative developers, designers, and most importantly entrepreneurs. All of these people focused on helping small businesses grow and monetize their online performance, and learned from names such as CrazyEgg, Product Planner, ACS, and more.

Optimizely

A list such as this one would not be complete without Optimizely, one of world’s leading website optimization systems that specializes in multivariate and A/B testing. Optimizely is hassle-free to use, and requires no technical expertise to change your website in a dynamic way.

The biggest benefit of it is that you get to test any variation of your website to live trafic before it has been implemented, which gives you a clear picture of the quality of that variation.

Optimizely is currently serving more than 5,000 enterprises, among which Weather.com, Disney, eBay, Starbucks, Crate & Barrel, and more. It has performed an incredible number of 190,000 (and counting) web experiments, with more and more users being able to confirm its data-driven approach to decision making.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel has a slightly different way of helping websites optimize content: it targets primarily online businesses, and helps them understand their users’ behaviour and actions undertaken towards a specific product. The goal here is to collate product data, which is why the system works with 6 billion information points month by month.

At this very moment, Mixpanel helps hundreds of millions of web and mobile users build successful products.

Chartio

Chartio has been recognized by leading experts in the industry for its unique data processing approach. It is probably the simplest BI tool you will ever get to use, as Chartio focuses on your own database rather than external sources and complex data warehouses. Plus, the platform is coding-free, and lets anyone build a functional and shareable dashboard.

Segment

Segment collects first and foremost customer-related data. If you’re a developer, for instance, it will allow you to input customer data only once, and then track how customers are browsing on their desktops and mobile devices. It will also translate data upon need, and pass it on to as many analytic applications as necessary.

Another important reason to consider it is the JavaScript browser library, as well as server-side languages, and dedicated apps for Android and iOS users. The same as Mixpanel, it will go over billions of data points, be that you’re running a startup or a Fortune 500 company.

Uxcam

UXCam is one-of-a-kind when it comes to collecting data in a creative way. What it does is to record in video users’ experience while using your app/website, and making that data available to you for any type of analytics.

It will take you exactly 2 minutes and 2 lines of code to integrate it with your system, and you will soon have all important info captured and fully visual. It is most useful to developers looking to gather UX experience, and apply it for the sake of their apps’ usability.

You can also use UXCam to:

Test users anonymously

Collect feedback and gather bug reports

Correlate video with other types of analytics to put things into context

Trepscore

In short, TrepScore lets entrepreneurs see all of their important data and customer accounts gathered on a single dashboard. The integration logic is the same large companies support, but yet comes at a price low-tier marketers can afford. While it analyzes your data and prepares detailed reports, this system also sends automated alerts for the owner to take immediate action.

The system takes your data under control, and automates a number of cumbersome analytic tasks that waste both your time and your energy. Their unique package is also able to adapt to whatever change in your dataset, always trying to let you focus on genuinely important matters.

Basically, you will be getting a whole new perspective of the health of your business, and more importantly – some clever investment directions.

Trepscore is very easy to apply, as it bases its work on an independent evidence-principle. This is how it manages to turn seemingly disconnected sources into actionable data units, and how it brings everything you need under the same umbrella.

Google Analytics

There is little chance that someone hasn’t heard of Google Analytics, world’s leading enterprise-grade web analytic tool that comes up with the richest traffic and marketing effectiveness insights. It is intuitive, flexible, and no-brainer to use, and provides all features necessary to analyze data in your own way.

What will Google Analytics do for you? To start with, you will learn how to improve your ads for better targeting, and how to foster marketing initiatives towards higher and lasting conversions. The company offers a Premium package for business usage that combines powerful optimization tools with professional assistance and ease of use.

The rates are affordable, to say at least, and there are no recurring fees to worry about.

Ruler Analytics

Ruler Analytics targets companies that handle multiple phone calls and online conversations, being the number-one call tracker and web analyzer able to match data from different sources (PPC, SEO, and so on). Using it, you will have access to: