Launch Day + Analytics

The big day has come, and we finally released the Beta version of Viur for a selected few. This post describes what tools we used and how we used them.

Since day one we have a subscription form on the landing page to capture early adopters. This allowed us to have a good user pool to start working as soon as we had something to show. For this, we used Mailchimp, which has a generous free tier and allows you to set up email campaigns and track opens and clicks among other things.

In the main site we use two awesome tools:

• Google Analytics to track specific metrics (like bounce, exit rate,etc...), goals and specific events we trigger (we will talk more about this in a future post).
• Heap Analytics to know how users interact with our site. Heap allows us to see what each specific user clicks and visits from the moment he enters the site. Setting up Heap is dead simple since it’s all done visually.

To track what users do inside the app we also use the mandatory Google Analytics and Mixpanel. We chose Mixpanel because it has a Java library that we could easily use with our server code and, like Heap, it allows us to know what each user did. It’s a good tool to keep an eye on what's going on and to know who are your most and less active users, which allows you to engage them differently.

So, with all these analytic tools in place, the worst part is to have a bunch of tabs open to control each one individually. That SaaS fragmentation problem is one of the pains we are solving: we allow people to explore, analyse and blend data in just one place. We are supporting Google Analytics and databases for now, but we are about to start integrating with other services like mixpanel and mailchimp. Then at the end of the day we only have to  look at a dashboard like this: