Session vs event analytics

The owner of any site, especially one that should be profitable, wants to know who and how visits his site. And the most simple and free answer to this question is given by the most popular analytics systems: Google Analytics and Yandex metrics. But do they give answers to questions interesting for business and how accurate are they?

Indeed, it is very interesting to observe how your site is growing, gaining momentum, increasing the number of views and visitors, watching how much time they spend on the site and how far they go deep into the site.
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But most often, if you have Google Analytics or a metric, you enter it, see what excellent numbers there are, how the number of your visitors has increased, and the analysis ends here.
But if you are an analyst guru, then you know how to set goals and can measure how many visitors came to the payment page. But even this does not give you the desired picture, because you still need to be able to build cohorts, and select only those visitors who have reached the goal, who have done it all their lifetimes.
As a result, if you are not a world-class analytical ninja, then you spend a lot of time and do not see the big picture.
The question is, what do alternatives look like?

Let's talk about event and session analytics. Let's see what it is and how they differ.

This is probably the best description of these two approaches:

Session analytics tell you what happened, event tells you who did it.

This is the difference between session analytics (Google Analytics, Yandex Metric) and event analytics ( Kissmetrics , mixpanel ): session analytics is directed to your website, event-based, in turn, to your potential customers.

Session analytics give you an idea of ​​your site: which pages are most visited, which demographic groups most often visit your blog or your landing page.

But, if your business is built directly on monetizing visitors (as is often the case with web services and online stores), using session analytics you do not understand how your customers behave. And if you do not understand who your customers are and how they behave inside your website, how can you figure out how to make the service better for them so that your business continues to grow? Understanding your visitors is a critical moment and deserves detailed attention.

Properly configured event analytics can help you answer the following questions:

• how many users made an order or purchase for all who came to the site for the specified period and from the specified channel?
• which button on the page gives a higher result of the conversion?
• How effective is one channel or another to attract visitors to the site?
• Does the added functionality affect sales?
• What is the effectiveness of e-mail newsletters? And can we increase it?

Answers to these questions are more important than knowing the time spent on the site or the bounce rate.

There is something else that event analytics can do:

• collect data on the actions of each user
• identify user segments (users who are at different stages before making a purchase)
• work with segments, highlighting a specific group of users, in order to understand why, for example, users have not finished registering.

Comparison of event (mixpanel) and session (analytics) analytics

	Mixpanel	Google Analytics
View site pages	Events appear manually, which is difficult and sometimes mistakes are made.	Automatically, through tracking code.
Funnel tracking	Easy customizable funnels	Configuring funnels is difficult, through user events
Real Time Tracking	Live view of events in real time	Events are not traceable in real time.
Setting goals	Easy task setting based on parameters	Pretty complicated setup, through customs reports.
A / B testing	Collect user activity data with additional properties to track A / B test scores	A / B test framework is automated, but difficult to use.
Tracking clicking links	It is difficult to do this automatically when the pages change.	Automated, based on URL
Price	It depends on the data point, so you need to be careful and do not spend the quota.	Free up to 10M data points / month
Support	Quick support from an engineer in a short period of time	Official documentation is the best source.
Users	Collects data about the actions of each user and left contacts.	Aggregated data for all users

Event analytics looks more interesting. In addition, it can provide not only analytics, but also other additional features for working with your users.

We are confident that the features described are only the tip of the iceberg. Since knowledge of the actions of each user and the data that he left is not yet investigated Klondike increase the effectiveness of any resource.

Therefore, we are developing the carrotquest.ru service, which is based on collecting data on user actions, but we do not limit ourselves to building funnels and measuring the conversion of various actions.
For example, imagine an on-line chat that knows about every action a user has, about his interests in this or that product or service.
Or a pop-up window with a suggestion to leave the e-mail that appears in the scenario: for site visitors from Yandex, who came for the 3rd time, added the product to the basket, but did not leave the mail (and did not buy it).

Read the previous article about simple event analytics.