12 essential tools to measure and optimize for product-led growth

Product-led growth (PLG) is about optimizing your product so it can drive self-service sales, deliver quick value to users, and convince them to convert from freemium or trial users into paying customers. 

To succeed, your PLG tech stack should make it easy to collect quantitative and qualitative product usage data, so you and your teams always know what’s happening in the product and where the best growth opportunities are.

We've made a list of 12 of the top tools product-led teams (including us at Contentsquare👋) use to power growth. We’ve broken it into 2 parts:

1. Product-led tools to track product metrics

2. Product-led tools to improve the digital experience

There’s no need to use every tool we cover. Pick a few from each section, and you’ll have a well-rounded tech stack to support your product-led growth strategy.

Product-led growth tools to track product metrics 

These 5 tools collect and display quantitative product metrics in clear, shareable dashboards, so everyone involved with the product can track growth and identify areas for optimization. 

1. Mixpanel

What it is: Mixpanel is a freemium (yes, they’re product-led, too!) product analytics platform for tracking the performance of mobile and web applications. 

A demo Mixpanel dashboard showing product click activity

Ways to use Mixpanel for PLG: 

• Track key quantitative metrics like LTV (customer lifetime value) and churn rate

• Measure user click activity across the product to see what’s getting ignored

• Build funnels to visualize how free users convert into paid users

• Segment data to spot what drives retention

By integrating Mixpanel with Contentsquare, teams can send events to Mixpanel when a new replay is created or feedback is received, and add context and qualitative product insights to Mixpanel’s standard SaaS metrics.

 2. Tableau

What it is: Tableau, part of Salesforce, is an enterprise business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform for visualizing and analyzing data. Tableau Cloud is the self-serve, cloud-based version used by distributed teams. 

How to use Tableau for PLG: 

• Import and connect product data from multiple sources

• Build and share interactive dashboards, charts, and graphs to spot trends

• Perform statistical analyses and forecast summaries

 3. ChartMogul

What it is: ChartMogul is a freemium subscription analytics platform for SaaS companies. It’s designed to be simple to use and free for new companies (payment starts once you hit $10K MRR).

How to use ChartMogul for PLG: 

• Track SaaS metrics like MRR, ARPA (average revenue per account), and trial-to-paid conversion rate

• Pull data from Stripe, PayPal, and other payment processors

• Segment data to find likely-to-convert user profiles and profitable pricing plans

4. Baremetrics

What it is: Baremetrics is a premium subscription analytics tool for SaaS companies.

ConvertKit’s Baremetrics dashboard How to use Baremetrics for PLG: 

• Track SaaS metrics like MRR growth rate, expansion revenue, and reactivations

• Forecast cash flow, MRR, and customer numbers based on current data

• Benchmark your progress against similar companies

• Collect cancellation insights to learn why users churn

Pro tip: use Contentsquare to collect cancellation insights by setting up a churn survey on a confirmation page to ask users why they're leaving or downgrading. 

An example of a Contentsquare churn survey

5. Tealium

What it is: Tealium is a freemium customer data platform that brings together product event data from different web and mobile apps.

An example Tealium dashboard (Source: Tealium)

How to use Tealium for PLG: 

• Collect and combine product data from all PLG tools in one place (for example, Contentsquare, Mixpanel, and Optimizely)

• Share data from multiple sources with product, marketing, and engineering teams

• Make holistic, data-driven product decisions

Contentsquare’s tools integrate directly with Tealium, meaning data from heatmaps, session replay, and surveys can be accessed via Tealium and combined with other tools. 

💡 Quick tip: combine Mixpanel and Contentsquare Surveys in Tealium, and trigger surveys to users with lower-than-average LTV to find out what’s holding them back from upgrading.

Product-led growth tools to improve the digital experience

These 6 tools will help you collect qualitative product experience insights, improve UX, design better onboarding flows, and deliver excellent self-serve support so users can find product value fast—and stop churning. 

6. Contentsquare Session Replay

What it is: Session Replay is a freemium session recording tool from Contentsquare (yes, that’s us!) that collects a replayable version of an individual user's browsing behavior (including mouse movements) across multiple pages.

A snapshot of Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool in action

How to use Contentsquare’s Session Replay for PLG: 

• Spot problems, bugs, and user pain points

• View browsing behavior from key cohorts (e.g. churning customers or free trial users)

• Combine session replays with other PLG tools to see what’s behind the numbers

• Share key replays to get buy-in for product updates from stakeholders

We might be a bit biased with this recommendation (😉), but we also have plenty of experience using Session Replay in-house to connect the dots between what’s happening (e.g. “expansion revenue is down 10%”), and why it’s happening (e.g. “we can see the upgrade button is not working because users are rage clicking on it”). 

Using Session Replay insights, our product team can:

• Identify user behavior that correlates with desired product outcomes like retention and free trial-to-paid conversion, then optimize our products to increase PLG metrics

• Find and fix the bugs and issues that stop users from completing their JTBD (jobs-to-be-done, i.e. what users need from Contentsquare products)

 7. Contentsquare Surveys

What it is: Surveys is a freemium on-site and stand-alone Contentsquare tool to collect product feedback from users. 

A Contentsquare product-market fit survey template How to use Contentsquare Surveys for PLG: 

• Collect voice-of-the-customer (VOC) feedback to learn what users love (and hate) about your product

• Target surveys to specific user cohorts to get insight that impacts key metrics (e.g. a churn survey to learn why customers leave)

• Track how likely users are to recommend your product and fuel word-of-mouth-growth with a Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) survey

8. AB Tasty

What it is: AB Tasty is a freemium experimentation platform for creating A/B, multivariate, and redirect tests, user personalization, and custom banners. 

An example of an AB Tasty dashboard (Source: AB Tasty)

How to use AB Tasty for PLG: 

• Test UI changes to see their impact on user behavior

• Target users by demographic or behavior to test changes on user segments

• Permanently serve personalized content to a specific group of users

Pro tip: get more from your AB Tasty tests by integrating it with Contentsquare to collect qualitative session replay and survey data during experiments. Segment user insights by your A/B test to learn why a test wins (or loses) so you can make iterative improvements.

9. Intercom

What it is: Intercom is a customer communication platform for sending product updates, messages, and notifications to users. 

How to use Intercom for PLG: 

• Announce product updates to logged-in users to increase engagement

• Send notifications to offline users to reduce churn

• Send targeted messages to segmented users to nudge behavior

Teams can connect Contentsquare with Intercom to access session replays directly within chat conversations. This provides customer support teams with insights into user behavior and context behind interactions, enhancing support responses and improving the overall user experience.

10. Appcues

What it is: Appcues is a premium user onboarding and product adoption tool for building in-app product tours and onboarding flows. 

Source: Appcues

How to use Appcues for PLG: 

• Build customer onboarding flows to reduce TTV (time to value) for new users

• Notify users of new or relevant features to increase adoption

• Collect user feedback and NPS® to monitor user sentiment

Teams can connect Contentsquare with Appcues to track and analyze user interactions with flows, forms, NPS® surveys, and checklists directly within Contentsquare session replays. 

11. Zendesk

What it is: Zendesk is customer service software for managing and monitoring the customer experience.

Source: Zendesk

How to use Zendesk for PLG: 

• Create self-service help documentation so users can find answers on their own

• Create answer bots and live support chats to solve user issues

• Collect CSAT (customer satisfaction) scores to measure customer success

Teams can connect Contentsquare with Zendesk to automatically create a new ticket every time a user requests to be contacted when leaving a comment through Contentsquare’s feedback widget. 

12. Braze

What it is: Braze is a cross-channel marketing platform for measuring, creating, and optimizing interactions across the customer journey.

Source: Braze

How to use Braze for PLG: 

• Design and send lifecycle email campaigns relevant to each user

• Use data points like user engagement, geolocation, and purchase history to personalize in-app content

• Leverage AI-driven personalization to optimize content delivery

Connect Contentsquare with Braze to automatically track events when a new replay is created, a user responds to a survey, or someone leaves feedback. 

Put PLG tools into action

Knowing some of the best tools for product-led growth isn’t going to improve your product: you need to actually use them. 

But you don’t have to build the perfect stack to get results. Start with one or two tools that fit your budget and growth stage—for example, a simple combination of ChartMogul and Contentsquare, both freemium tools that scale as you grow, will give you the quantitative and qualitative product data needed to drive product-led growth.

FAQs on PLG tools