Google Analytics gives you a lot of good information but one thing you won’t see in Google analytics is people. People are at the core of Tend, so you can see exactly who came from any of your marketing tactics.
Tend continues to follow people after the initial "conversion" so you can see if your marketing efforts are driving the right people. Are your social media efforts resulting in paying customers many months later? Do your ads drive profitable customers? These are all question Tend can answer in an intuitive way, without a lot of setup.
For most situations, installing Tend is super simple. You copy and paste the tracking script and you're done. Not only is Tend collecting visit data, but anytime someone enters their email anywhere on your site, that email submission is captured as well.
With Google analytics, installing the tracking script is just the first step. Then you have to set up a conversion action, get your conversion tracking tag, make sure the tag is firing how you expect it to, etc etc. Then, if things aren't working, you have to troubleshoot, which usually involves a developer. If you're reading this page right now, you probably know exactly what I'm talking about.
Google Analytics emphases pageview data and contacts aren't even something you can (or are allowed) to see in Google Analytics. So if a customer pays you money today, it's pretty hard (sometimes impossible) to see where that person came from.
Tend's approach focuses on people and groups of people. So you can see a group of people like leads or customers and determine what influenced that group (ads, pages on your site, emails, referring websites etc). When you see what actual people are doing on your site, you understand things on a different level.
Tend allows you to see an individual's history from the first click and every visit and page thereafter. If you are interacting with people on a one-to-one basis, this can be very helpful in determining where they are in the process and even what they are interested in.
Because you can push data into Tend, you can differentiate the more profitable customers. For example, you could see if a certain marketing channel was sending people who paid for multiple months of a subscription, paid a lot more money or had a lot of customer support issues.
Because Google anonymizes their data, you can't see a contact's history.
People don't usually click an ad or read one blog post and become a customer right away. Usually, it's a long process. They see an ad, come to your site. Leave, come back because of a post on social media. Leave, and come back because of one of you're emails.
Tend captures all of that and breaks it out so that you can understand how influential each of your marketing tactics are.
The Tend search feature is built on the idea that you have certain questions that you want answered, without deciphering multiple reports. For example, you might want to know how many paying customers came from Facebook.
To do that, you just type in "Facebook", then "Customers" and you'll have you're answer. Want to see how many leads a certain PPC keyword generated? No problem. Just go to the search and type in your keyword and "leads" and you'll see that.
Because Tend tracks conversions without depending on setting up "goals" or "events", you don't have to think about every single form or landing page you make. As long as the tracking script is on your pages, Tend is tracking the referrers, pages and conversions on that page.
So you can launch a campaign and a new landing page without worrying about getting the conversion in place first.
When important thing happen off of your website, you can automatically push that info to Tend. For example, if a credit card transaction happens you can push that data to Tend. Then you can use search for those events in Tend in combination with other data. For example, "show me all Facebook traffic that resulted in a payment".
When something important happens on your site, you can send that information to other applications. So if a big client looks at your pricing page, you can get an email or Slack notification. Or if someone starts to fill out a form on your site, but doesn't complete it, you could send them an email to see if they have questions.
Our Zapier integration makes push data into and out of Tend super easy. When you use Zapier, you can connect Tend with hundreds of other applications and send data without a developer. It's easy to create workflows, get alerts or update other applications based on how people interact with your website.
We're still a pretty small company, so if you need help or run into problems, the Cofounders, Ryan (that's me) or Marty are definitely going to know about it and probably even help you directly. Larry and Sergey (Google founders) might be smarter than us, but they're probably not gonna field your support issue or make improvements based on your suggestions ;)