Uncover hidden visitor insights to improve their website journey
Understand the obstacles visitors encounter, pinpoint their most engaging touch points, and analyze their actions on your website to identify areas for improvement, resulting in enhanced experiences and increased conversions.
Imagine knowing exactly what your customers want—before they even express it.
It’s not enough to just sell a product; it’s about truly understanding your customers, their needs, behaviors, and preferences.
Advanced customer analytics tools offer the insights necessary to decode customer behavior, optimize journeys, and cultivate deeper loyalty. By leveraging these tools, you can enhance the way you engage with your audience and drive long-term growth.
In this blog, we’ll explore the various types of customer analytics tools, their benefits, and how to select the best ones for your business. Because understanding your customers isn’t just helpful, it’s essential for sustained success.
What are customer analytics tools?
Customer analytics tools collect, measure, and analyze customer data to provide insights into behavior, preferences, and interactions across the entire customer journey. These tools help businesses understand who their customers are, how they engage with products or services, and what drives their purchasing decisions and loyalty.
The primary capabilities include:
Customer segmentation based on demographics, behavior, and purchase patterns
Lifecycle analysis to track user journeys from acquisition to retention
Predictive modeling to forecast customer lifetime value and churn probability
Cross-channel analytics for understanding user behavior across web, mobile, email, and other touchpoints
Cohort and retention analysis to identify patterns in user engagement over time
Sentiment analysis to gauge customer emotions and satisfaction from feedback and interactions.
Types of customer analytics tools
1. Customer behavior analytics tools
These tools focus on tracking and analyzing customer actions and interactions with your website, app, or product. They provide insights into user behavior patterns, preferences, and pain points, helping businesses optimize the customer experience and improve conversion rates.
2. Predictive analytics tools
Predictive analytics tools use historical data, machine learning, and statistical algorithms to forecast future customer behaviors, trends, and outcomes.
By analyzing past customer interactions, these tools help businesses anticipate customer needs, personalize experiences, and make proactive decisions to enhance satisfaction and loyalty.
3. Sentiment analysis tools
Sentiment analysis tools process customer feedback, reviews, and social media mentions to understand customer emotions, opinions, and attitudes toward a product or brand.
These tools use natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to identify whether customer sentiments are positive, negative, or neutral, providing valuable insights for brand management and customer service strategies.
4. Customer journey analytics tools
These tools focus on mapping the entire customer journey, from awareness to post-purchase, tracking interactions across multiple touchpoints.
By identifying key moments in the typical customer journey, where customers engage or drop off, businesses can optimize every phase of the experience to improve conversions, customer satisfaction, and retention.
5. Customer retention and loyalty tools
These tools are designed to help businesses track and improve customer retention, loyalty, and lifetime value. They provide insights into customer satisfaction, engagement, and potential churn, allowing businesses to create personalized campaigns, rewards, and incentives that strengthen relationships with existing customers and encourage repeat business.
Below is a table showcasing the top 5 customer analytics tools, each offering unique features that cater to different aspects of customer data analysis.
Tool
Customer Analytics Category
Pricing
Free Trial
VWO
Customer behavior analytics
Starts at $139/month (billed annually)
30-day free trial
Google Analytics
Predictive analytics
Google Analytics 360: Starts at $50,000/year
Freemium model
Brandwatch
Sentiment analysis
Custom pricing
14-day free trial
Woopra
Customer journey analytics
Starts at $49/month
14-day free trial
InMoment
Customer retention and loyalty
Custom pricing
30-day free trial
10 Best customer analytics tools: In-depth review
Customer behavior analytics tools
1. VWO
VWO is a leading end-to-end conversion rate optimization platform that allows you to analyze user behavior, conduct A/B testing, and personalize customer journeys. It enables businesses to make data-driven decisions, boosting engagement and conversions.
VWO Insights overview
Best features
Heatmaps
You can visualize customer behavior on your website using color-coded heatmaps, which track user interactions and highlight where visitors focus their attention. This helps identify areas of strong engagement and those that may need improvement. Dynamic heatmaps capture interactions with live elements. Clickmaps highlight where visitors click. Scrollmaps reveal how far users scroll on a page. Click area heatmaps compare clicks across different sections, and element lists provide detailed click data for specific elements, including hidden ones.
Session recordings
Session recordings provide a detailed look into user behavior, showing how visitors navigate your website. It tracks user interactions, highlighting frustration points like rage clicks and dead clicks. Its customizable filter option allows segmentation by funnel stages or specific pages, providing targeted insights.
Form analytics
You can gain insights into how users interact with your forms by tracking where they drop off and how long they spend on each field. It reveals customer struggles with form completion, highlighting areas that cause friction and allowing you to optimize for a smoother user experience.
Open-ended surveys
You can capture deeper insights by allowing users to provide detailed feedback in their own words. These surveys go beyond simple ratings, helping you understand what customers liked or disliked about their experience. Its AI-powered summaries condense key insights from responses, eliminating the need for manual analysis and providing actionable data in real-time.
How the Insights Dashboard provides a complete view of user insights
It offers a centralized dashboard that helps businesses analyze customer behavior across various touchpoints, providing actionable insights to enhance user experience.
Insights Dashboard
It scores webpage experiences from 0 to 100, helping businesses quickly identify underperforming web pages and areas of improvement.
Gain full control over how you want data to be collected, as VWO offers both dynamic and flexible sampling methods. Flexible sampling enables you to adjust the amount of traffic tracked, helping you optimize your data usage. On the other hand, dynamic sampling captures every visitor interaction during high-traffic periods, ensuring you don’t miss any crucial insights.
A notable success story: Micro Focus drives conversion with VWO Insights
Micro Focus, a FTSE 250 software group with nearly five decades of experience in digital transformation, has been using VWO since 2016 to optimize conversions across its main website and sub-domains.
Challenge:
Low form completions
Free Trial CTA not visible
Low traffic on Marketplace product pages, leading to missed revenue opportunities
Solution:
Using VWO Insights, the team visualized user drop-offs, ignored elements, and friction points through heatmaps, scrollmaps, and session recordings. This helped refine website design and functionality before running a series of tests.
Results:
Adding asterisks to mandatory fields improved form completions by 5.89%
Adding product links on the Marketplace increased product page traffic by 124.13%
Micro Focus effectively optimized key elements and boosted conversions by understanding user behavior.
Watch the full webinar with Ali Good to learn how to capture and act on the Voice of the Customer effectively:
How Healthpost transformed their eCommerce experience with VWO
Watch Roshan Vinod, UX Designer at Healthpost, as he shares how VWO contributed to their eCommerce success. Check out the full video testimonial below:
2. Hotjar
Hotjar is a powerful customer behavior analytics tool that helps businesses understand how users interact with their websites. By combining key features like heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys, it offers deep insights into user actions, preferences, and pain points.
Hotjar’s surveys offer pre-designed templates that make it easy to gather valuable customer insights. These surveys help you understand user motivations, identify pain points, and collect actionable feedback. Additionally, the feedback widget allows you to capture real-time user sentiment directly from your audience.
Tableau is a powerful analytics and visualization tool designed to provide real-time, data-driven insights into customer behavior and preferences. It helps businesses enhance customer interactions, achieve micro-segmentation, and make informed decisions. With its robust features, Tableau is a go-to solution for organizations seeking to understand and anticipate evolving customer needs.
Its AI-powered predictive analytics feature uses advanced algorithms to anticipate customer needs and forecast future trends, empowering businesses with better targeting and more informed decision-making.
Tableau
Best features
Real-time analytics
Micro-segmentation
Visualization at every touchpoint
Correlation analysis
Distribution analysis
Volatility analysis
Pricing and free trial
Starting Price
Free Trial
$15/user per month
14-day free trial
A customer experience as per G2 reviews:
Tableau is the most helpful and powerful for me, and I have been using it since my internship. It’s been more than 2 years since I used it for data visualization, because I really like how Tableau makes data visualization very easy. I can drag and drop fields to create charts and dashboards quickly. It helps me to show trends and insights to my team in a way that is easy to understand. The pre-built templates and visual options save a lot of time. Also, it integrates easily with BigQuery for a live data stream. It’s really easy to us,e and I have implemented skills in it.
Robin D. Junior Data Analyst
4. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a widely used analytics tool. It helps businesses track and analyze website traffic, user behavior, and engagement metrics. By providing both quantitative and qualitative data, Google Analytics helps businesses understand how customers interact with their websites and optimize their marketing strategies accordingly.
Its robust features, like segmentation and custom dashboards, help businesses tailor their analysis to specific audience groups and objectives.
Google Analytics Dashboard
Best features
Real-time reporting
Audience reports
Behavior flow analysis
Conversion tracking
Funnel analysis
E-commerce tracking
Segmentation
Site search analysis
Campaign tracking
Pricing and free trial
Starting Price
Free Trial
$50,000 per year (Google Analytics 360)
Freemium model available
Sentiment analysis tools
5. Brandwatch
Brandwatch leverages social listening to provide businesses with valuable insights into customer opinions, brand health, and market trends. It uses AI to analyze online conversations across social media platforms, news websites, blogs, and forums, offering a comprehensive view of public sentiment. Brandwatch enables brands to track customer experiences, identify emerging trends, and gain a deeper understanding of their audience’s needs.
Its sentiment analysis feature helps measure brand perception by assessing emotional tones in customer mentions, and the audience insights feature provides detailed data on demographics and interests, enabling businesses to tailor their strategies effectively.
Brandwatch
Best features
Social listening
Brand health tracking
Advanced reporting
Influencer tracking
Crisis management
Advanced filtering
Keyword tracking
Pricing and free trial
Starting price
Free trial
Custom pricing based on business needs
14-day free trial
A customer experience as per G2 reviews:
Brandwatch is an incredibly helpful tool when it comes to finding content online and being able to analyze it. It is fairly user friendly and straight forward, but there is always a support team member at the ready when you need help, and that has been my favorite part.
Courtney P. Social Media Analyst
6. Sprout Social
Sprout Social helps businesses manage their social media presence while gaining valuable insights into customer behavior. It combines social media management with robust analytics to track engagement, sentiment, and trends, enabling brands to deliver exceptional customer experiences and foster loyalty.
Its social analytics feature provides in-depth insights into audience engagement, content performance, and overall social media ROI. Additionally, Sprout Social offers paid social ads and analytics, enabling businesses to evaluate and report on the success of paid social campaigns across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Sprout Social
Best features
Social listening
Audience demographics
Competitor analysis
Sentiment analysis
Audience engagement metrics
Trend analysis
AI-driven insights
Custom reporting
Influencer marketing
Hashtag performance tracking
Pricing and free trial
Starting price
Free trial
$199/month
30-day free trial
Customer journey analytics tools
7. Woopra
Woopra provides real-time insights into user behavior across multiple touchpoints. By offering comprehensive tools for tracking, segmentation, and reporting, Woopra helps businesses optimize their customer experiences and improve retention rates.
Its real-time customer journey analytics allows businesses to visualize and optimize the entire customer experience. Additionally, its retention reports monitor user engagement trends and measure the effectiveness of retention strategies over time.
Woopra
Best features
Customer journey mapping
Behavioral Segmentation
Funnel analysis
Dynamic segmentation
Retention reports
Custom reports
Cohort analysis
Churn prediction
Pricing and free trial
Starting price
Free trial
$49/month
14-day free trial
A customer experience as per G2 reviews:
Our company uses Woopra on a daily basis to gather insights that we can’t find anywhere else. We’re able to blend custom journery reporting (what pages users interacted with) along with user attributes that are merged together from Stripe, BigQuery and a number of other sources. This insight helps us make key business decisions on a continual basis. Along with this Woopra’s support is always there for us if we run into any roadblocks.
Andrew K. Owner & Operator
8. Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics helps businesses understand customer actions, track conversions, and improve retention. By focusing on the customer journey and lifetime value, Kissmetrics empowers companies to make data-driven decisions and optimize their marketing efforts.
It integrates with testing tools to track and analyze the impact of experiments on customer behavior. Additionally, it can also measure the long-term value (LTV) of customers to refine acquisition and retention strategies.
Kissmetrics
Best features
Funnel analysis
Event tracking
Customer segmentation
Revenue reporting
Behavior-based insights
Cohort analysis
Campaign tracking
E-commerce analytics
Pricing and free trial
Starting price
Free trial
$299/month
14-day free trial
Customer retention and loyalty tools
9. InMoment
InMoment is a customer experience management (CXM) platform that helps businesses collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback in real time. Itcentralizes customer feedback from various sources, enabling businesses to understand their customers’ needs and concerns.
Additionally, its reputation management feature allows you to respond swiftly to customer concerns, maintain a positive brand image, and make data-driven decisions that boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.
InMoment
Best features
Text analytics
Conversational analytics
Predictive analytics
Brand monitoring
Sentiment analysis
Customer feedback analysis
Customer journey mapping
Pricing and free trial
Starting price
Free trial
Customized pricing based on business requirements
30-day free trial
A customer experience as per G2 reviews:
InMoment is an easy-to-use platform. Supportive staff, when needed, are very responsive. I have always been happy with the InMoment Experience Improvement platform.
Beth W. Senior Customer Engagement Analyst
10. Zendesk
Zendesk offers a suite of tools for managing customer inquiries, tickets, and support tickets across multiple channels, including email, chat, and social media.
Its real-time and historical data feature allows businesses to access up-to-the-minute information and analyze past trends, facilitating timely decision-making. Additionally, Zendesk provides pre-built dashboards for every channel, enabling businesses to monitor performance across different platforms effectively.
Customer analytics tools offer crucial insights for analyzing customer data. Here’s why they are important:
1. Deeper customer understanding
These tools enable businesses to discover valuable insights about customer behaviors, preferences, and pain points. Analyzing data can help companies create detailed customer personas and tailor experiences that meet specific needs.
2. Data-driven decision making
Customer analytics tools transform raw data into actionable insights, empowering businesses to make informed decisions. This eliminates guesswork and ensures strategies are based on accurate, up-to-date customer information.
3. Enhanced personalization
With customer analytics, businesses can deliver hyper-personalized experiences by understanding individual preferences and predicting future needs. Personalization drives customer satisfaction and loyalty, setting your brand apart from competitors.
4. Increased retention and loyalty
Identifying potential churn and addressing it proactively is crucial for retention. Customer analytics tools help businesses track loyalty indicators and create retention strategies that keep customers engaged and coming back.
5. Optimized customer journeys
By mapping the entire customer journey, customer analytics tools highlight areas where customers face friction or drop off. Businesses can optimize these touchpoints to create seamless, enjoyable experiences.
6. Improved ROI
With better targeting, improved customer experiences, and reduced churn, customer analytics tools directly impact the bottom line, maximizing the return on marketing and customer acquisition investments.
How to select the best customer experience analytics tools
With several options available, it’s important to carefully evaluate tools based on the following factors to ensure you select the one that aligns with your goals:
1. Customer analytics category
Every tool specializes in different aspects of customer analytics, such as UX analytics, behavioral tracking, customer journey analysis, or real-time insights. Understanding the specific category that aligns with your business objectives is essential for selecting the right tool. It ensures that you gather the right type of data to drive actionable insights.
2. Ease of use and integration
The tool should integrate smoothly with your existing systems, such as your CRM, marketing platform, or website. A user-friendly interface is also critical, especially for teams that may lack technical expertise. The simpler the tool is to implement and use, the faster you can start leveraging insights to improve the customer experience.
3. Data security and privacy
When selecting an analytics tool, it’s vital to ensure that it complies with privacy regulations like GDPR, CCPA, or industry-specific security standards. Data security should be a top priority, especially if you handle sensitive customer data.
4. Pricing and scalability
Different tools offer various pricing models, so it’s important to choose one that fits your budget and can scale with your business growth. Look for flexible pricing plans that allow you to start small and expand as your customer base and needs grow. This ensures that the tool remains affordable as you continue to use it more extensively over time.
5. Advanced features and customization
Many customer experience analytics tools offer advanced features such as predictive analytics, AI-driven insights, real-time reporting, and customization options. Evaluating the level of sophistication and flexibility that the tool provides will help ensure it can meet your specific requirements and adapt as your business evolves.
6. Customer support and resources
Excellent customer support is vital for troubleshooting issues and maximizing the value of the tool. Look for analytics platforms that offer robust resources, such as tutorials, documentation, and a responsive support team. This ensures that you have the guidance needed to fully leverage the tool and optimize your customer experience strategy.
Wrapping Up
Your customers are speaking through their clicks, purchases, and feedback. It’s time to listen, analyze, and act. With the right customer analytics tools, you’re equipped to turn insights into impact and create a future where your customers feel seen, heard, and valued.
Customer analytics tools help businesses understand their customers, refine strategies based on those insights, and create meaningful connections.
By leveraging the insights these tools provide, you can craft personalized experiences, improve customer retention, and drive sustainable growth.
Customer analytics involves collecting and analyzing customer data to understand behaviors, preferences, and interactions, helping businesses improve customer experience and make data-driven decisions.
Q2. Why are customer analytics tools important?
They provide insights into customer behavior, enabling businesses to personalize services, optimize marketing, and enhance customer experiences, leading to higher conversions and better retention.
Q3. How do you select the best customer analytics software tool?
Look for tools that are easy to use, integrate well with other platforms, offer customizable reports, provide advanced data analysis features, and have strong customer support.
Q4. What are the various types of customer analytics tools?
Customer behavior analytics tools: These track and analyze user actions and preferences. Predictive analytics tools: These forecast future customer behavior and trends. Sentiment analysis tools: They gauge customer emotions and feedback from text data. Customer journey analytics tools: They analyze customer interactions across various touchpoints. Customer retention and loyalty tools: They help improve customer retention and measure loyalty programs.
Hey there! I'm Aastha Trehan, a content marketer at VWO. I write, manage, and execute content. I love creating high-quality, engaging content that resonates with readers. When I'm not working, you can find me playing badminton or basketball, binge-watching movies, or getting lost in a good book. I'm also an adventure enthusiast and love trekking.
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We're satisfied and glad we picked VWO. We're getting the ROI from our experiments.
Christoffer Kjellberg
CRO Manager
VWO has been so helpful in our optimization efforts. Testing opportunities are endless and it has allowed us to easily identify, set up, and run multiple tests at a time.
Elizabeth Levitan
Digital Optimization Specialist
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Marketing Technology Manager
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