Five common tools to monitor and collect analytic data for your digital product

Continuing our series of maximizing your digital investment with product maintenance and enhancements, here are five commonly used tools for monitoring and collecting analytics data:

1. Google Analytics (GA): Google Analytics is a free web analytics service that provides insights into website and app traffic, user behavior, conversions, and more. It offers a range of features for tracking and analyzing user interactions. GA is the most popular open-source marketing tool for analyzing online traffic and can be used for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing. It provides reliable data insights that brands can use to identify platforms effective for their target audience, prepare a functional marketing strategy, and assess their digital marketing performance.
2. Mixpanel: Mixpanel is a real-time analytics platform that helps companies measure and optimize user engagement by tracking customer behavior. It provides insights into product usage and user behavior to help make data-driven decisions and improve your products. Mixpanel also offers advanced features for analyzing user journeys, retention, and engagement metrics and enables product teams to gain deep insights into how users interact with their digital products.
3. Heap: Heap is an analytics tool that automatically captures every activity every user does on web, mobile, or any other platform, across a lifetime of interactions.  It contains a set of functionalities that capture and visualize all the ways users engage with a digital experience, and offers a user-friendly interface for exploring and visualizing data. Heap captures and visualizes all the ways users engage with a digital experience, allowing teams to analyze user behavior without needing to instrument specific events beforehand.  
4. Amplitude: Amplitude is a product analytics platform designed to help companies understand user behavior, measure the impact of product changes, and drive growth. It tracks the behaviors of users based on in-product interactions and analyzes user behavior in real-time and surfaces trends so products can adapt quickly. Amplitude offers features for cohort analysis, funnel visualization, and A/B testing.
5. Firebase Analytics: Firebase Analytics is a free app analytics solution that provides reporting on up to 500 events, offered by Google as part of the Firebase platform. The Analytics section of Firebase provides a dashboard that shows key metrics like user activity and conversions. It offers real-time insights into app usage, user demographics, and in-app behavior, helping developers optimize their apps and engage users effectively.

These tools enable product teams to track and analyze various metrics related to user engagement, retention, conversion, and more, allowing them to make data-driven decisions to improve their digital products.