Planning the next decisions about your startup's marketing strategy or product roadmap shouldn't feel like a stab in the dark.
As a person responsible for the growth of a SaaS business, you have a unique advantage: your product is software, so you can have excellent visibility into how people interact with it.
It's easy to measure how many people visit your app's website, and what part of that group ultimately starts an account. You can track various events happening within your product: which features are the most popular among users, how often people come back to your app, who decides to abandon it.
Revenue-related data is also possible to collect: you can see which accounts generate the most profit and what's the average lifetime value of your customers.
With all of these details at your fingertips, there's really no excuse for not using SaaS analytics tools. After all, being data-driven will help you make informed decisions, quickly identify improvement areas, and effectively boost your company's bottom line.
In this blog post, we've outlined 14 apps that will help you with SaaS data analytics. Before we dive into the list of tools, let's recap the main metrics you should track in your SaaS business.
Essential metrics for SaaS marketers
You might have already heard about the so-called pirate metrics or AARRR (or AAARRR if you add "awareness" to the mix). AARRR stands for different stages of the customer lifecycle:
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) – You get a visit from a new potential customer who might even provide you with some identifiable data when they, e.g., sign up for a newsletter. At this stage, you could measure website visits, ebook downloads, email subscriptions, etc.
- Customer Activation – In other words, customer activation is what happens when a web visitor tries out your software. You might have acquired this person with helpful content, but now it's time to make a good impression with your product and customer service. Activation SaaS metrics include account registrations, free trial signups, the number of free-tier customers.
- Customer Churn Rate and Revenue Churn Rate – Retention is important for the rest of the customer journey. It could mean that someone keeps using your app after signing up for the trial, but you can also measure the retention of paying customers. As for retention metrics, you should pay attention to n-day retention, churn, and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Churn rates are most important - you should concentrate on retaining current users and avoid spending all resources on generating new users only. Low churn rates mean that both your product and customer support are great which make your customer base grow regardless.
- Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) – Of course, you have to track the financial results of your SaaS. Users enter this stage when they make a purchase decision and become paying clients. Apart from the MRR and ARR, there is one more important revenue metric that include month-to-month MRR growth. You should see the monthly progress and check if your MRR is growing indeed.
- Referral Rate – Happy clients become brand ambassadors and help to get new customers on board. Understandably, it's an essential and effective strategy to drive SaaS growth. Monitor the NPS score and organic recommendations on social media to understand how well you're doing here.
- CAC to CLV ratio – The stable flow of new users is great. But much greater is to acquire new users that bring revenue. That's why you always need to pay attention to how much you spend on your marketing and sales activities in comparison to how much the customers coming from these campaigns are paying you. If CAC is much greater than CLV, it's time to consider adjusting the strategy and making it more cost-efficient.
Why is it valuable to understand different stages in the SaaS customer lifecycle and associate them with specific metrics?
It allows you to identify the areas where you could be doing better and focus your efforts more strategically. Ignoring one part of the funnel may significantly hurt your profits. You simply can't afford that.
Fortunately, SaaS analytics tools have been designed to help you track the most important metrics for your SaaS company: from acquisition to revenue. Here's our list of analytics software that can help you to monitor your business.
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Top SaaS analytics software in 2023
Each of the SaaS analytics tools described below can support SaaS companies in their growth. However, the optimal use cases for these apps might differ. This is why we're going to outline the main features of all of these apps and list their prices so that you can find an analytics tool that perfectly fits your needs and your budget.
Google Analytics
Some might consider Google Analytics to be a "basic" analytics tool and think that in order to do some "serious" analytics, they need to opt for a different tool. That's not the case. Google Analytics is deceptively powerful for a free option.
It allows you to get a very good overview of what's happening on your landing page and within your app, both in terms of user acquisition and activation. Set custom goals to track conversion rates and use segments to analyze different user groups.
Price: It's free! There are paid enterprise options as well, but the standard version of Google Analytics should be enough for most SaaS businesses.
Heap
Heap is an analytics app that helps SaaS businesses build better products based on data. It allows you to analyze the activation and retention metrics to see which user actions correlate with the continued use of your SaaS. Knowing what makes people convert, you can tweak your app and make people experience these crucial actions early in their journey.
One of the big advantages of Heap is that you can get started with tracking different events without any engineering team's assistance. On top of that, it auto-captures different data points, so you can begin collecting insights even if you're not yet sure what exactly you want to evaluate.
Price of Heap: Free plan available with limited features. Premium plans pricing information available upon contact.
Hotjar
Hotjar is a great SaaS analytics app to better understand what people do on your website. It provides you with a set of tools: heatmaps, site recordings, or form analysis to help you visualize user behavior and find areas that need some work. Based on the insights collected in Hotjar, you can run some experiments and, ultimately, improve conversion rates of your web pages.
Hotjar is also a tool for gathering user feedback, both quantitative and qualitative. You may put up an NPS survey or ask visitors to describe what they like and don't like on your website. It's a great way to collect ideas for conversion optimization.
Price: Free plan with limited features available. Premium plans start at €29/month.
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Smartlook
Smartlook is one of SaaS analytics tools that offer visitor recordings and heatmaps, which allow you to take a closer look at your users' behavior. With Smartlook, you're likely to get a lot of data quickly, as it records every visitor session. Later, you can easily navigate through multiple recordings using filters. For instance, you may specify that you only want to see the recordings of people who visited your pricing page or first-time users.
Smartlook also offers mobile apps analytics, so if your SaaS software comes with a mobile app, you can keep your finger on its pulse as well.
Price: Free plan is available with limited features. Premium plans for websites start at €31/month.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel gives you a better understanding of how people are using your SaaS. You can track user events in real time to spot improvement areas. Once you know what can be fixed, optimize it, and use Mixpanel to measure your experiment's impact on user engagement and retention. You can also drill down the data to see which customers are particularly engaged and which ones are likely to churn. Gathering these signals allows you to act in advance and keep your monthly recurring revenue growing.
This SaaS analytics software is well-liked by engineers and data scientists, as it allows them to build custom data pipelines.
Price of Mixpanel: There's a free plan with a limited number of tracked users and 90-day data history. Premium plans start at $89/month for 1000 monthly tracked users.
Intercom
Intercom might not be at the top of your mind when you think about SaaS analytics tools simply because it's primarily a customer relationship platform. It offers solutions, such as a website chat or a self-help center, helping you build connections with your audience and delight them with timely customer support.
Why did we include Intercom in the list of SaaS analytics? Besides being a useful business messenger, Intercom provides you with many insights about your users. You can track custom events, segment your customers, and even create targeted messaging based on people's behavior. Looking at the customer support inbox, you can investigate the actions people do before they typically ask for help.
Price: There are dedicated plans for each of Intercom's main features. The all-in plans start at $87/month.
Hubspot
Hubspot is an inbound marketing software used by many companies to launch campaigns, create landing pages, and build marketing automation workflows. All of your marketing activities from different channels can be tracked in the app. You will see which sources generated the most attention and how your email marketing campaigns performed.
Since Hubspot also offers a tool for sales teams, your customers' journey is transparent at every step. Your sales specialists are able to check how a given lead interacted with your brand in the past and tailor their pitch accordingly.
Price: Hubspot offers some of its tools for free. Paid Marketing Hub plans start at €36/month.
Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics offers product and marketing SaaS analytics that cover multiple stages of the customer lifecycle, from new subscriptions to monthly recurring revenue. Customer activity reports show you which features are the most popular among different types of customers. Such insights allow you to, for instance, improve the onboarding experience for your users.
You can create funnels representing the journey from new visitors to paid customers and identify the dropoff points. What's important, you can tie data to real accounts and monitor the engagement of different leads.Price of Kissmetrics: They offer dedicated SaaS plans—Silver (10k monthly tracked users, 3 user seats) is at $299/month or $2699/year.
ProfitWell
ProfitWell is an app that provides you with SaaS subscription analytics in real time. You are able to track your trial users or paying customers and dig deeper to get more information about particular accounts. There are also features for monitoring revenue retention and churn.
In the face of the current economic situation, they have recently launched a ProfitWell Subscription Index, a set of data showing daily trends in the B2B SaaS market. You can monitor it to see how different verticals are doing in terms of monthly recurring revenue and compare your results with the general trends.
Price: ProfitWell offers core SaaS Metrics and Reports for free. Paid upgrades are available.
Baremetrics
Baremetrics offers analytics and engagement tools for SaaS companies. Use it to track your subscriptions and measure the impact of different campaigns on your growth. Baremetrics can be integrated with popular payment providers like Stripe, Chargebee, or Braintree.
Additional features of Baremetrics include Recover, a set of tools to help with failed payments. It allows you to set up automated email campaigns, in-app remainders, and use credit card capture forms to re-engage your customers.
Price: The basic subscription price starts at $50 per month and depends on your MRR. Extra features (messaging, cancellation insights) are priced separately.
ChartMogul
ChartMogul is a subscription data platform that you can connect to your billing provider and get SaaS analytics in real-time. The app comes with filters that help you segment your customers and see, for instance, how your metrics look in different geographical regions. If you want to track your growth over time, you can set up monthly or quarterly targets.
ChartMogul offers solutions to clean up subscription data: you can merge customers or manually edit your MRR details if, for example, there was a billing mistake.
Price: There is a free plan that covers core subscription analytics. Paid plans start at $100/month.
Userpilot
Userpilot is a SaaS tool that helps businesses improve their user onboarding and user experience. It provides a no-code solution for creating personalized onboarding flows, product tours, and walkthroughs to guide users through key features and actions within an app or website.
With Userpilot, your businesses will be able to easily create targeted user segments based on behavior and demographics, and deliver personalized experiences to each of the segments. There are also A/B testing and analytics features to help businesses optimize their onboarding flows and improve conversion rates.
Userpilot integrates with a variety of popular tools and platforms, including Segment, Intercom, and Zapier, making it easy to enhance existing processes. The platform is used by businesses across a range of industries, including SaaS, e-commerce, and fintech, to improve user engagement and retention.
Overall, Userpilot aims to help businesses create a seamless and engaging user experience, ultimately leading to increased customer satisfaction, retention, and revenue growth.
Price: Userpilot offer a free demo, and their pricing starts at $249 per month.
SE Ranking
SE Ranking is a robust toolkit providing unique, data-backed insights for SEO analytics. With a comprehensive set of the tool’s features for competitive & keyword research, rank tracking, website audit, and backlink analysis, you can gain precious data needed to optimize your SEO strategy.
This SaaS SEO tool continually finetunes data processing algorithms, which is why its data is highly accurate and relevant. Thus, whether you perform an SEO check to analyze keywords driving traffic to your website or your competitors’ efforts leading to success, you can easily rely on SE Ranking. By the way, by integrating GA4 and GSC with this platform, you can analyze user engagement, track SEO performance metrics page-by-page, and keep an eye on conversions—all in the same place.
Price: New users can get a free 14-day trial with access to all service features. For paid users, the platform offers 3 customizable plans, with the price starting from $55 per month.
Looking for more insights for your SaaS business? Check out this article about SaaS operations and how your SaaS can benefit from it.
How to present your insights? Top SaaS analytics reporting apps
Most SaaS analytics tools listed above provide you with charts that help visualize information. Still, you might want to create a custom SaaS dashboard and connect data from different sources. This is where reporting apps come in handy:
Google Data Studio
It allows you to plug data from Google Analytics, Google Ads, or spreadsheets, and create informative dashboards for your team or investors. Filter information or change the date range with one click. This tool is currently offered free of charge.
Grow
It's a business intelligence software that enables you to build robust dashboards based on different data sources. You can schedule metrics to appear in a chosen Slack channel on a recurring basis. Plans start at $300/month for spreadsheet data.
Databox
This app helps you to track the most important metrics for your SaaS business. Pick your crucial KPIs and set alerts that will notify you about their status via Slack or email. You can enjoy a free Databox account with limited data sources and dashboards. Paid plans start at $49/month.
Cyfe
This is another SaaS reporting app that offers an esy-to-use reporting dashboard. Self-reporting, KPI monitoring, SEO, scheduling, SMM, custom reports, data exporting, archiving, and much more can be found among the Cyfe features for SaaS businesses. The company has a 14-days free trial, and later you can purchase the tool starting from $19 per month.
SaaS Analytics - are you ready to get data-driven?
We hope that our list of powerful SaaS analytics tools will help you find the right app to analyze your product. Start with thinking about the metrics you want to track—the pirate metrics framework will help you to organize them into categories and consider different stages in the customer journey. Then, check which SaaS analytics tools can help you measure your essential metrics in real time.
Before you commit to an analytics tool, make sure to give it a try or at least participate in a product demo. You also might want to check how a given app will fit into your team's current marketing toolbox: integrations, customization, etc. Does it check all of your boxes? Awesome! You've just found yourself a tool that will help you keep track of your product's growth.
Do you know other great SaaS analytics apps that didn't make our list? Let us know via chat! We're happy to expand our blog post and showcase even more analytics tools for SaaS businesses.
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