The 7 Best SaaS Analytics Software of 2021

SaaS businesses thrive on data. But data alone doesn’t make much sense. This is where analytics software comes in. Analytics tools help SaaS businesses generate actionable insights from the data they collect, which then fuels their decisions.

But what data should you analyze and how?

In this post, we will break down the analytics software each SaaS business needs to understand their buyer and user personas, prospects, users, and revenue metrics & company health.

We’ll also tell you which data points and metrics you should pay particular attention to and how to track them using the SaaS analytics software listed here!

Table of Contents

• What types of Analytics software does every SaaS business need?
• Marketing Analytics Tools for SaaS
• Traffic analytics software for SaaS
• Social Media Analytics Tool for SaaS
• Product & User Behaviour Analytics Tools for SaaS
• Revenue SaaS Analytics Software
• 9 KPIs to track for your SaaS business
• Conclusion

TL;DR

• Instead of looking for a tool that caters to all your analytics needs, look for tools that specialize in specific aspects of SaaS, such as marketing activities, user behavior, or even revenue.
• Google Analytics helps SaaS businesses understand their website audience better by tracking a range of visitor activities.
• NapoleonCat lets you measure and analyze user activity, while Brand24 tracks your brand mentions across social media platforms.
• Product and User behavior analytics tools provide you with insights that can help you monitor user activity across the user journey.
• Heap is an all-around product analytics solution that tracks all sorts of in-app user interactions and helps you answer the question — what is happening.
• Userpilot is a code-free onboarding platform that is quite useful for mid-term user analytics that makes user behavior data easier to interpret and track by using predefined goals.
• FullStory tracks user interactions and creates funnels to help you observe how your users behave in each funnel.
• Profitwell is a brilliant freemium SaaS analytics tool that allows you to track your revenue, user growth, and common SaaS metrics.
• A few of the important KPIs you can track for your SaaS business include ARPU, MRR, ARR, Expansion MRR rate, Churn MRR rate, Churn, LTV, LTV:CAC, and User Retention Rate.

What types of SaaS analytics software do you need?

There is no one-size-fits-all software that provides analytics on every aspect of your SaaS business. You can find tools that specialize in marketing activities, user behavior, or even revenue.

SaaS businesses need marketing analytics tools to shape their marketing strategies and reach potential customers effectively. This includes tracking the activity of both web and social users.

Product and user behavior analytics tools help you track user journeys, UX issues, and more.

Again, if you need to measure the financial impact and feasibility of your SaaS business decisions, revenue analytics tools come in handy.

Marketing analytics tools for SaaS

Marketing analytics tools help SaaS businesses craft data-driven marketing strategies. Picking the right marketing analytics tool can help you answer the following questions:

• Who is visiting your website?
• How are your visitors interacting with your blog content?
• Where are your visitors spending the most time during each browsing session?
• How many of your visitors are converting?
• Where are you getting the most conversions? From which blogs? From which CTA?

You can get these answers using traffic analytics software like Google Analytics and social media analytics tools like NapoleonCat and Brand24.

Traffic analytics software for SaaS

Google Analytics

Google Analytics helps SaaS businesses understand their website audience better by tracking a range of visitor activity, including how users arrive at your site, where they navigate, and how much time they spend on each page.

Google Analytics also features conversion tracking, allowing you to track the source of each conversion after setting up your conversion points. This helps you improve your marketing messages, and combining this information with the overall user activity data helps you craft better user personas.

You can track new users visiting your website over a specified period. Keeping track of new users at least on a monthly basis helps you understand how your traffic is growing over time.

Go to Audience > Overview, and take a look at the user data. You have the option to select from hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly data. You can also select two ranges to compare data from two different periods within the same interval.

Next, you can track the traffic source and medium to identify which acquisition channels are bringing in the most traffic.

Go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source Medium.

To see which channels are converting best, select “Goal Completions” from the drop-down list.

If you want to see which pages are converting best, set Primary Dimension to “Landing Page” and choose the right conversions. You can then filter by your blog pages in the advanced setting.

Identifying the best channels and landing pages that lead to the most conversions helps you emphasize the content that best resonates with your audience.

While Google Analytics does allow you to set up goals, it falls short of tracking the effectiveness of specific CTAs. But tracking clicks on all CTAs is important when multiple CTAs point to the same location, such as Free Trial or Demo sign-up page. In that case, you can create custom events based on relevant event parameters.

Social media analytics tools for SaaS

Your potential users are not only on your blog or website.

Users are increasingly going beyond conventional search engines to look for information about brands. Studies have shown that over 70% of internet users are using social media to look for information about the products they’re interested in buying.

So, what can your social media followers tell you about your user persona?

NapoleonCat

NapoleonCat lets you measure and analyze user activity on your social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

You can keep track of your social media reach and engagement and identify your top-performing content. This helps you craft better marketing messages.

You can also get insights on the best times to publish content for your audience. Besides, the tool provides detailed information about your audience demographics for each social media channel, helping you learn more about your users’ personas.

Another brilliant feature is its comparative analysis, which lets you monitor competitors and compare your performance against industry benchmarks.

Brand24

Brand24 tracks your brand mentions across social, news, blogs, videos, forums, podcasts, reviews, and more.

Brand24’s brilliant social listening features allows you to analyze the quality and quantity of discussion about your brand while helping you gain insights about your customers.

It also offers influencer analytics, which helps you pick the right influencers who can engage with your customers most effectively.

Brand24 also offers sentiment analysis to track mention sentiments and help you gain a better understanding of user attitudes towards your brand.

Product and user behavior analytics software for SaaS

The data you’re collecting from your product helps you understand how much value users are getting from your product and where you can make improvements.

Product and user behavior analytics tools provide you with insights that can help you monitor a user’s journey to conversion, identify bottlenecks and disengaged users, and track customer health scores for each of the segments.

SaaS businesses need to consider three levels of product analytics, which are the answers to the three questions:

• What is happening?
• Who is doing it?
• Why are they doing it?

Product and user behavior analytics tools like Heap, Userpilot, and FullStory help you answer these questions.

SaaS analytics software #1 — Heap: for high-level product analytics

Heap is an all-around product analytics solution that tracks all sorts of in-app user interactions and helps you answer the question — what is happening.

Heap allows user-level and account-level tracking. It doesn’t require any additional configuration or event definition to get started. You can start tracking user activity from day one.

You can create custom events and use them in funnels and cohorts. Heap allows you to combine tracked data into your own custom “virtual events”.

If your data parameters or event definitions have changed, you can also define events and conversions retroactively to keep up with the latest updates.

You also get real-time reporting and analysis along multiple axes and behavioral segments. Heap also comes optimized for both web and mobile applications.

Keep in mind that Heap has a sharp learning curve when it comes to product analytics knowledge. However, considering its extensive functionalities, it’s worth learning.

Although Heap has a free package with unlimited user licenses, it is restricted to 1 project and 10k sessions per month. The pricing for Heap’s paid plans starts from $1,000 per month.

SaaS analytics software #2 — Userpilot: for mid-term user analytics

Userpilot is a code-free onboarding platform that is very useful for mid-term user analytics. It makes user behavior data easier to interpret and track by using predefined goals.

Since Userpilot tracks user behavior based on your predefined goals, you get to decide where you want to focus on.

Userpilot’s analytics generate insights based on what users are doing in your app. These are based on custom events or “feature tags”, and you can “tag” a feature on the front-end of your web app.

Userpilot also helps you build user segments and funnels easily using custom filters on user activity data.

For example, you can set filters to find users who signed up less than 3 days ago, are using your product for themselves, have more than 3 web sessions, speak German, have seen the first onboarding experience, and have an NPS score of less than 8.

This helps you understand who is doing what. The actionable insights from these analytics can help you optimize in-app experiences to help struggling users or push hesitant users further down their user journey.

Another valuable feature of Userpilot is its ability to create secondary onboarding experiences that can help users unlock more value along their user journey.

This is important because basic users don’t discover certain features themselves once after activation. This often leads to them not being able to find the feature they need, eventually leading to churn.

Kommunicate, a chatbot tool, faced a similar problem.

The Kommunicate team found 5–7 key features that paying customers were adopting, and plugged them all into Userpilot’s product adoption feature.

Initially, only 28% of users were reaching those features. After Kommunicate released small product adoption cues this increased to 41%.

Kommunicate’s “chat widget customization” was another breakthrough. This led 6% of users to complete the chat widget customization goal after the cue was introduced. A 3% increase in the feature’s usage led to a 2–3% increase in revenue, substantially affecting Kommunicate’s MRR.

Want to start creating similar experiences without a line of code — and boost your feature adoption? Book a free demo and start increasing your product usage today!

SaaS analytics software #3 — Fullstory: for drilling down to qualitative data

Measuring clicks and creating segments help you answer the question “what”, but it doesn’t tell you why.

If you want to go deeper into the reasons behind every action your user takes, you have to witness it firsthand. This is where session recording tools like FullStory prove their worth.

With FullStory, you can track user interactions and create funnels. You can then observe how your users behave in each funnel.

FullStory combines qualitative data, i.e., session recordings and quantitative product analytics. This gives you more valuable insights to understand the causes behind specific user actions when compared to standalone quantitative data analysis.

It records page views and visitor clicks, as well as incorporates user data to give you the most accurate representation possible while recreating user sessions.

FullStory’s AI and machine learning features make extracting accurate insights from your data much easier. It also offers dashboards that you can use for visualizing KPIs like conversion rates after tracking and calculation.

If you’re collaborating with your team on a project, you can use FullStory’s Slack integration to easily share user sessions with your teammates.

But as always, there’s a catch.

FullStory doesn’t disclose their pricing information on their website. It does offer a free plan with limited access to three seats and 1,000 sessions per month. You can also opt for a 14-day free trial for its paid plans.

SaaS analytics software for revenue

All of the analytics tools discussed so far help you track user activity and marketing channels.

But what about your finances and company health?

At the end of the day, all the segmentation, funnels, feedback, and UX improvements boil down to one question — is it bringing in more revenue?

Revenue analytics tools like ProfitWell can help you gauge the impact your product and marketing activities have on your finances.

ProfitWell

Profitwell is a brilliant freemium SaaS analytics tool that allows you to track your revenue, user growth, and many common SaaS metrics.

ProfitWell’s real-time analytics and reporting tools allow you to keep track of everything and leverage KPIs to make informed decisions. You can make important decisions based on accurate data about your customers, competitors, and product performance.

Its advanced AI software helps you get highly accurate revenue recognition, which is crucial for SaaS businesses. This helps you better understand your revenue channels and sources, reducing the scope of speculation.

ProfitWell also helps you reduce churn rates, thanks to its sophisticated algorithms. It makes it easier to determine the optimum pricing for your products and upgrades by leveraging real-world data about your industry and market trends.

ProfitWell offers its ProfitWell Metrics plan for free, which comes with real-time analytics and reporting capabilities. You can track important metrics like Lifetime Value (LTV), Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Usage Rate, and more for free. It also offers paid plans with different sets of functionalities. These include Retain®, Recognized®, and Price Intelligently.

9 KPIs to track through your SaaS analytics

KPI #1: Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)

The Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) or Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA) denotes the amount of revenue a paying user generates during a specific period.

Like the number of users, revenue generated by each user is an important metric in SaaS. The goal of product marketing is not only acquiring new users but also increasing account expansion, which is measured using ARPU.

KPI #2: Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is calculated by multiplying the average revenue per account by the number of accounts in a given month.

MRR is the first step to understanding if your product marketing is driving growth or not.

KPI #3: Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)

Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) is similar to MRR, except it considers a yearly instead of monthly interval.

Keeping an eye on both MRR and ARR helps you understand whether or not your efforts are generating sustainable results.

KPI #4: Expansion MRR rate

Expansion MRR rate tells you at what rate you’re growing through account expansion.

The formula for Expansion MRR rate is:

(Expansion MRR at the end of the month — Expansion MRR at the beginning of the month) / Expansion MRR at the beginning of the month x 100

Where expansion MRR = revenue from upgrades in the month + revenue from add-ons in the month

KPI #5: Churn MRR rate

Churn MRR rate denotes how much revenue you have lost in a range of time because of churn.

The formula for Churn MRR Rate is:

(Churned MRR- Expansion MRR) / starting MRR x 100

Where Churned MRR = revenue lost due to churn in a given period.

KPI #6: Churn

There are two types of churn relevant to measuring the success of product marketing — customer churn and revenue churn.

Customer churn is the percentage of customers lost in a period due to subscription cancelations.

The formula for customer churn is:

Revenue churn shows the financial impact of losing specific customers.

The formula for revenue churn is:

Considering both customer and revenue churn helps you understand the real impact churn has on your business.

For example, if you compare losing 100 customers paying $100 each to losing 100 customers paying $1000 each, you can realize the varying impact of churn on the business.

KPI #7: Customer Lifetime Value (CLV or LTV)

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV or LTV) is the amount of money a business earns from one customer over the duration they stay your customer. It represents how profitable it is to invest in acquiring a customer.

You can calculate LTV in multiple ways.

One way to calculate it is by dividing your average revenue per account by your churn rate.

We have covered (LTV)-Customer Lifetime Value metric more in-depth in a different article, so go and check that out, too.

KPI #8: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio

The Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio shows how efficient your product marketing is at acquiring customers.

An LTV to CAC ratio below 1 means you are spending more money to acquire customers than the revenue you get from them. This is unsustainable, and no business can support this long term.

Although there is no magic number, a healthy LTV to CAC ratio in SaaS can be considered as one which is 3 times or more than your cost of acquiring a customer.

KPI #9: User Retention Rate (URR)

User Retention Rate (URR) will tell you the percentage of users you retained during a specific period.

You need to look at user retention rates at different intervals. There are multiple ways of calculating user retention rates. Some of these are:

• day 0 retention rate
• week 1 retention rate
• 7 days range retention rate

Conclusion

Winning your niche requires you to make the best use of the data you collect. This makes SaaS analytics tools more valuable than ever.

With the tools we’ve compiled, you can track user footprints at every step of their journey and understand how they are engaging with your product.

Google Analytics can get you insights on web traffic, while NapoleonCat and Brand24 help you analyze follower activity and discussions about your brand.

Heap, Userpilot, and FullStory offer valuable insights on in-app user activity and user engagement with your product.

ProfitWell keeps track of your revenue, user growth, and important metrics for your SaaS business.

To learn more about how you can get started with insights on user activity, book a free demo with Userpilot today!