Product research is the process of pointing your product development in a direction dictated by what the researched user desires in your product.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the top 7 product research tools to make your research more efficient and accurate. 

Top 7 Product Research Tools

Here is a curated list of our top 7 best product research tools.

1. FullSession – User Behavior, Analytics and Session Replay

Fullsession lets you watch session recordings of visitors on your site, and gives you a wide range of general and behavioral analytics that are used to optimize your sites user experience.

  • Record all your sessions on the website or landing page
  • Watch recordings of your visitor actions in real-time
  • Watch user flow from the entry page to the exit page

What Is Session Replay?

Session recordings track and let you watch everything that a user does on your website. It includes clicks, keystrokes, and scrolls that your user makes.

image of session recording software in us

Benefits of Session Replay In Product Research

Session replay gives you:

1. In-depth user analytics.

2. The ability to watch how users interact with your site, this allows you to make your own judgement in product research.

How do these abilities benefit your product research process?

  • Understand user needs and preferences
  • Improve customer support
  • Improve the user experience
  • Troubleshoot product issues
  • Test new features
  • Improve product design
  • Identify areas for improvement

Heatmaps

Fullsession also offers heatmaps that show where users click most. These insights help make sure every part of your site is optmized.

Image of heatmap software viewing page heatmap

Different types of heatmaps:

  • Click maps
  • Scroll Maps
  • Mouse Movement Maps

You can use these heatmaps to enhance your product research, anywhere within your app or marketing site.

Analytics Provided

Can analytics that Fullsession offers replace a tool like Google analytics? The answer, yes. Fullsession has all of the tracking features as any other common analytics tool… plus way more. This is exactly what you need in an analytical product research tool.

Common Analytics Fullsession Tracks:

  • Session Duration
  • Bounce Rate
  • Location
  • Device
  • Visit Source
  • URLs Visited
  • Time Spent On Page
  • Views
  • Conversion Rate

Unique Analytics Fullsession Tracks:

  • Keystrokes
  • Click Location
  • Scroll Maps
  • Churn
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS)
  • Customer Satisfaction Score
  • Active User Ratio
  • Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
  • Error Data
  • Dead Clicks
  • Rage Clicks
  • Page Load Time
  • Scroll Depth
  • Lead-to-conversion rate
  • Return Rate

FullSession pricing plans

Fullsession pricing image 2024

The FullSession platform offers a 14-day free trial. It provides two paid plans — Basic and Business. Here are more details on each plan.

  1. The Basic plan costs $39/month and allows you to monitor up to 5,000 monthly sessions.
  2. The Business plan costs $149/month and helps you to track and analyze up to 25,000 monthly sessions.
  3. The Enterprise plan starts from 100,000 monthly sessions and has custom pricing.

If you need more information, you can get a demo.

Wistia – Embedded Video Analytics

Videos are everywhere, but do they work? With Wistia’s analytics, it’s not about guessing anymore. It gives you hard data on who watches what and for how long, for any Wistia hosted video on your site, or in-app. 

This is great for product research because now you have insights and analytics into the videos you publish on your app.

Why Use In-App Videos?

Quick and seamlessly integrated in-app videos are becoming more common with time. Some examples of these videos are:

  • Videos during product onboarding.
  • Videos to explain different areas of your product.
  • Blog topic videos
  • Videos about use cases to help the user use your product more efficiently. 

Wistia gives the ability to do all of these, but in a seamlessly integrated way, which is necessary. Seeing the analytics and feedback on these types of videos allows you to conduct research on different parts of your product.

Rapidr – Product Optimization

Rapidr makes collecting product features feedback a breeze. The software allows you to create customer feedback portals on your own site. Some things customers can do within the portal include: 

  • A portal for generic feedback.
  • Idea suggestion and community idea voting system.
  • Embed the widget to your site.
  • Private comments.
  • Private feedback.
  • Personal support.

You can also showcase a transparent and up to date product roadmap. Collecting feedback on this couldn’t be more close to developing the perfect product for your customers.

Actionable Insights Over Fluff Data

When data meets action—you get results. Dive deep into analytics within Rapidr’s platform and make informed decisions backed by actual user sentiments.

No more shooting darts in the dark; you can target pain points accurately for an experience that makes users stick around.

FullSession – User Feedback

Alongside analytics when it comes to product research, user feedback is important. As we mentioned, Rapidr is useful for product feature feedback, but what about UX and web design feedback?

Image of the website feedback survey creation process

Learn how to create a website feedback form for your own site.

Optimizely – A/B Testing

With a tool like Optimizely’s A/B testing tool, you can split test any two versions of your marketing site or even your app. When you integrate a tool like this with the other tools we’ve listed in this article, you can take your feedback and product suggestions, and put them to the test simultaneously. 

No more guesswork. Optimizely doesn’t just have A/B functionality, but their tool also makes it very easy to read and interpret the data. 

UserPilot – Product Onboarding and Flow

Imagine giving each user the perfect onboarding and product experience? That’s where UserPilot slides in. It doesn’t just show users the ropes; it turns their customer journey into their own fantasy.

With UserPilot, personalization is constantly driving engagement. This tool helps tailor the onboarding experience by segmenting users based on behavior or demographics so that they only see content relevant to them.

UserPilot thrives in its ability to create interactive walkthroughs without needing code—a win for both non-techies and developers who’d rather focus on building features. Plus, with its analytics dashboard, measuring success becomes seamless.

We’ve now wrapped up product research tools involving in-app optimization and research. But what about external product market research?

Ahrefs – SEO & Market Analysis

Ahrefs is the go-to tool that assists you in understanding your place among a great number of search results, as well as giving insight into what rivals are doing to their site and content. This can give you insights into what the market (buying intent) wants from your competitors new features. 

It offers an extensive keyword explorer, which lets you dive deep into keywords your audience actually searches for. Additionally, with their site audit feature, they’ll help you spot those sneaky technical issues that are holding back your organic rankings, as well as other things like site speed and schema markup.

How Is Ahrefs Beneficial For Market Research?

Ahrefs shows you SEO optimization techniques, yes. But this tool also gives you insights into any given market. 

In this case, a market would be a keyword topic. You can look at competitors strategies, market sentiment (buying intent), new product and feature releases, and run in-depth site audits to learn more about your own site.

Let’s continue with another external product reserach tool.

Product Hunt – New Products

Product Hunt is a tool that can be beneficial for your product research as viewer and a user. Here, fresh apps and web products take center stage each day, with creators getting real-time feedback from an engaged community.

Putting Your Product On The Platform

You may not be launching, with Product Hunt you don’t have to. You can put your product on their platform anytime you want, and get direct insights from your potential users.

It’s also a great way to attract some free customers, if you make it the top of their daily or weekly rankings.

Becoming A Viewer Of The Platform

By seeing how folks react to different features or concepts, businesses can iterate quickly without shooting in the dark. It turns first movers into smart movers because being early is good but being right is better.

Just checking Product Hunt once or twice a day will give you insights into the top products and features being released all the time. The closer these products are to your niche, the more you’ll adapt to getting that right PMF. 

FAQs in Relation to Product Research Tools

What is a product research tool?

A product research tool digs into market trends and customer preferences to help you tailor your products just right.

What are the types of product research?

You’ve got user testing, surveys, focus groups – all ways to provide what your customers really want.

What is the best market research tool?

The top dog varies by need but tools like FullSession, Rapidr and Wistia give you the most actionable insights. 

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