The Google Analytics Killer: HockeyStack Review

Understanding your website’s visitors and converting them into customers can be a challenge. But this challenge becomes even more challenging when you want to track the success of a website feature or an individual campaign. What are the best tools to use in keeping track of your site’s traffic? That’s where Hockeystack steps in.

HockeyStack is a B2B SaaS analytics tool that can help you track your website’s progress and present your data in an easy and uncomplicated way. It allows you to track your visitors’ behavior and see successful conversions from your website. In its simplest sense, it is a tool you can use to oversee the performance of your website in a user-friendly way. It can also be used as a SaaS analytics tool to track your conversion and churn rate. Join me as I discuss what it can offer for marketers and website owners like you in my HockeyStack review.

What is HockeyStack?

If you are interested in developing analytics without building an app, you can try using Hockeystack. HockeyStack is a no-code analytics tool that enables marketers, developers, SaaS business owners, E-commerce store owners, and other website owners to see their data in an uncomplicated and user-friendly way. Whether you already have a game plan or you are looking to set goals for your data, HockeyStack can do it for you. Marketers like you no longer need to lose key opportunities as you have all the actionable insights at your fingertips. This attribution tool can do things like track recent visitors, filter visitors, identify best performing marketing channel, analyze conversion rates for specific products, product engagement, and even track browser usage. You can easily track and determine the possibility of converting visitors into customers. With HockeyStack you can easily see what’s happening with your company on a daily basis.

Their founder, Emir Atli is a young and aspiring Turkish coder, while may be lacking in experience, is brilliant in creating a cookieless tracking tool to adapt to the new age of privacy oriented web.

Now that you already know what HockeyStack can do, let us see how it is distinct from Google Analytic.

How is HockeyStack Different from Google Analytic?

Of course, setting up a website is always fun and challenging for starting bloggers and companies who want to communicate and engage with some other users. And to be able to generate more engagement, you should be aware of the available analytics tools that can increase your landing pages. The most famous Google Analytic or GA can be a powerful software to help you monitor and improve your website’s performance but because of its complexities, I wouldn’t advise you to use it. The use of GA may require you to set up a lot of features and encourage you to learn first how they are being used. And this concern is one of the limiting factors for the users who don’t have the luxury of time to manage and track their websites’ analytics. Not to mention that these packages are quite difficult to set up. It might force you to hire staff that would handle and monitor the analytics that you need. This means additional expense for you which you can actually cut off with the use of the right analytics tool.

That is why I highly recommend HockeyStack. It is designed to provide the best and quality service for website owners of any kind. It is built with a user-friendly interface that doesn’t require codes, so you can easily monitor and manage your website’s engagement in just a few clicks. You don’t have to be a developer to understand how it is being used. With an organized and easy-to-understand dashboard built with drop-down menus, you can see your page’s conversion rates and follow your customer’s user journey on your website. HockeyStack has a simple UI yet can provide you with a comprehensible in-depth analysis of your website’s data. You can also get the information you need when you want to assess your website.

HockeyStack’s user-friendly interface is the primary reason why I like using this software. I must say this is one of their main advantages compared to other analytics software. Apart from its user-friendly UI, it also provides a safe space for your visitors because of its cookieless tracking feature. HockeyStack is a GDPR compliant tool that observes the data protection and privacy of its users, so your visitors’ can freely visit your website without being tracked on the websites they visit after.

An In-Depth Look at HockeyStack

Aside from the user-friendly interface that I like, HockeyStack has the following features that best analytics tools should have. 

Dashboard Sharing 

HockeyStack’s dashboard is a manageable feature that helps you track your website analytics. It enables you to see the basic metric or check the current status of your website. You can choose a certain time frame and filter users by device, browser, OS, language, and country. The dashboard displays the marketing campaigns used with its percentages and other metrics that will give you an insight into the performance of your landing pages like the bounce rates, pages per session, and session metrics. Another good thing about HockeyStack is if you’re an agency with paying clients, you can easily share your dashboard with another person publicly or with a password. That way, your clients can also see their website’s data on how well it has performed and identify the things they need to improve on. You can add as many users as you want since there is no limit on the number of users to your dashboard. Aside from having it customized, you can also add a password for each dashboard for security purposes.

User Exploration Tab

In this feature, you can find the exact users you are looking for and see their whole journey on your website. You can see how many users have visited your website and from what country they are from. You can also do this too in Google Analytics, but HockeyStack made it much easier. You can apply filters like users “who have done” and “who have done not” in a certain action, filter it by user properties or session properties, or any other current queries. You can also filter it by goals that you have done, pages, or youtube campaigns if you are using one. Once you are done filtering, you can see the users you are looking for and see their whole journey on your website.

With their simple to use UTM tracking features, you can easily track the performance of different ad networks and traffic sources to your site and how they perform.

Conversion Goals

It is very important for a website owner, b2b marketer, and business owner to track product data or whether the visitor who engaged in their website has been converted to a customer. And that is easy to do with the Conversion Goals feature of HockeyStack. You can easily create conversion goals or custom actions with no-code in seconds and start tracking them in minutes. Once you are done applying the filters for the goals that you need, a dashboard will be created to let you see the actionable insights of your website. You will be able to keep track of your visitors’ behavior inside your website. Also, you can get an idea about the other activities your visitors have done inside your website. This becomes a great aid for you to upsell your product.

Visual Funnels

A visual funnel chart is a powerful visualization feature that will help you illustrate a multi-stage process. It is a common marketing software that is used for visualizing website conversions, revenue, and other engagement data. The Funnels feature of HockeyStack is the visual version of your goals. This will give you knowledge of where your visitors have dropped off and the time they have spent on a certain step. This is a great help for you to easily visualize and comprehend if you have hit a certain goal on your website and analyze what should be done to convert the visits into sales.

Cookieless Tracking

Third-party identifiers or cookies really never worked well, making developers think of what are the other effective strategies for achieving the same goals of communicating effectively to your audience and measuring the impact. Gladly, HockeyStack uses cookieless tracking which enables you to generate the data you need, without sacrificing the right to privacy of your website visitors. Cookieless tracking utilizes scripts that run when a web user visits a web page, tracking every single action of every user. Unlike the other apps that offer free analytics, HockeyStack won’t track your visitors outside of your website or application which is a good way to protect their personal data. They complied with the GDPR law which protects the privacy of their clients after visiting their website. Thus allowing marketers to still be able to leverage data in a way that is respectful of consumers’ privacy. It is an applicable law that all analytics tools must comply with.

Accuracy

Most of the time, Google Analytics, Hotjar, and other analytics tools were blocked by web browsers because they misrepresent your analytics data. With HockeyStack, however, it excludes bots and uses small scripts for you to generate your insights faster and more precisely than other analytics tools. You can analyze your visitors by day or month Developers are more proud to say that they have coded HockeyStack from scratch making it more unique compared to other analytics tools.

Fast and Reliable Insights

Analytics tool uses heatmaps to help you understand how people interact with your website through the use of colors. It facilitates data analysis and gives an at-a-glance understanding of what your visitors are clicking on, what they scroll through, and what they ignore on your website. However, most heat maps only show you where the mouse landed and cannot really provide you the insight you need. Most of the time, they provide you with confusing data and unrealistic advice on what you should do next. In HockeyStack, it will does not only show you a fast and reliable data but also hidden insights that you can use in your marketing campaign. Say, you own an e-commerce store and you’ve seen that most of your customers are buyers from the United States. With HockeyStack you can easily identify what device they are using to shop from your website and on what platform they have seen your ads. It can be through the help of Facebook Ads, Twitter, and other social media platforms. Through this insight, you can get an idea of where you should focus to generate larger sales without having the need to consume your time understanding the data from heat mapping applications.

Pricing

If you’re interested in using HockeyStack, you would have to reach out to them directly as they no longer publish their pricing plan publicly. I was an early supporter of their software and have lifetime access through their lifetime deal.

Final Thoughts

HockeyStack is young, but it’s the one of the best analytics software for marketers, SaaS business, E-commerce store owners, and other website owners because of the user-friendly UI it provides. With its no code analytics feature, the cookieless tracking as a GDPR compliant feature allows you to track your visitors with today’s privacy restriction. With the highly customizable filters and custom actions tracking, it gives you large datasets to make your marketing decisions. It has definitely met most of my technical expectations as an analytics software. I believe they are also constantly growing and improving as they frequently have new jobs to hire backend engineers.

HockeyStack has a lot of upcoming features that users should look forward to. They will include plug-ins for WordPress, Shopify, and will be sending weekly email reports. They will be enabling the use of PDF export, a much-advanced filtering feature for the dashboard, and a lot more features that will be a great deal for website owners like you. I must say, even if it is still new, it is ready enough to compete with other analytics tools. With its innovative and advanced features, it will be more renowned in no time.