Kissmetrics Lifetime Deal on AppSumo: Full Review & Walkthrough

What Is Kissmetrics and Why Is This Deal a Big Deal?

Kissmetrics is a behavioral analytics platform originally founded by Neil Patel back in 2008, well before he became one of the biggest names in SEO and digital marketing. While Neil has since moved on from the company, Kissmetrics has continued operating as an established analytics tool trusted by businesses that need more than what standard analytics platforms offer.

The big news is that Kissmetrics has landed on AppSumo as a lifetime deal, and the pricing is genuinely surprising. Plans that normally run $200 to $500 per month are available as one-time purchases starting at just $59. This isn't a fire sale or a sign the company is struggling — Kissmetrics has a clear monetization strategy with their Engage and Campaigns upsell, which makes the lifetime deal sustainable for them and incredibly valuable for buyers.

AppSumo Tier Breakdown and Pricing

The AppSumo deal is structured across three tiers, each mapped to Kissmetrics' existing plans. Tier 1 at $59 maps to the Silver plan (normally $200/month) and gives you 50,000 monthly events across three domains. The limits are lower than the full Silver plan's 2 million events, but you get all the same features — and as Kissmetrics adds new features to Silver, your AppSumo plan gets them too.

Tier 2 bumps you up to 250,000 monthly events and maps to the Gold plan's feature set (normally $500/month). Tier 3 pushes the event limit to 2 million and includes unlimited seats, which is actually more generous than the standard Gold plan's 10-seat cap. One reassuring detail: Kissmetrics has committed that if they rename or restructure their plans, AppSumo buyers will be remapped accordingly. There's no bait-and-switch risk here.

For most small to mid-size websites, Tier 1 or Tier 2 will be more than enough. If you're running a high-traffic e-commerce store, Tier 3's 2 million monthly events should cover you comfortably.

Getting Started: Installation and Verification

Setting up Kissmetrics is straightforward — if you've ever added Google Analytics to a website, you'll feel right at home. The process boils down to copying a JavaScript snippet from your Kissmetrics dashboard and adding it to your site's header. You can paste it directly into your theme, use a code snippets plugin, or hand it off to a developer.

After adding the snippet, clear any caches you have running (page cache, object cache, Cloudflare, etc.) so the script appears on the public site immediately. To verify the installation, open an incognito window, visit your site, right-click to inspect the source, and search for "KISS" — your tracking script should show up in the HTML. Once confirmed, head back to Kissmetrics and open the Live view to see real traffic flowing in.

Live View and People Activity Feed

The Live view in Kissmetrics is one of those features that immediately makes you realize this isn't just another Google Analytics clone. When someone visits your site, Kissmetrics assigns them a unique ID — initially a long string of characters. Over time, as that person fills out forms or takes identifiable actions, that anonymous ID can resolve into an email address or other meaningful identifier.

Even from the first visit, Kissmetrics captures properties like the URL visited, how the visitor arrived (direct, referral, search), and their device's screen resolution. The People Activity Feed gives you a real-time, person-by-person view of what's happening on your site. Once you have event tracking configured, you'll see specific actions like button clicks and form submissions as they happen.

The Event Activity section groups these events together so you can see aggregate behavior — how many people are taking certain actions — while the Property Activity view groups visitors by shared characteristics like screen size or referral source. One thing to note: the Live view only shows data from after you open it. Navigate away and come back, and the feed resets (though all data is still captured in the background).

Event Tracking: Capturing What Matters

Event tracking is where Kissmetrics really starts to flex. Under Settings > Events, you'll find three sections: Tracking Rules, Tracked Events, and Tracked Properties. Tracked Events shows events that have already fired or were created by default (like "site visit"). To capture custom events, you create Tracking Rules.

Creating a tracking rule is refreshingly simple. You choose what to track — a page visit, form submission, or element click — then define the specifics. For example, to track homepage lead captures, you'd select "submits the form," enter the CSS selector for your form (like `#fluent_form_3`), and optionally limit the trigger to a specific URL. This means you can track the same form on different pages as separate events, giving you granular insight into where your leads are actually coming from.

Tracked Properties are the data points gathered from these events and general browsing. Out of the box, Kissmetrics captures a surprisingly rich set: email addresses from forms, browser type and version, city, country, device category, landing page, and much more. For e-commerce sites running WooCommerce or Shopify, dedicated integrations (WooCommerce plugin at $150/year, Shopify app at $35/month) can automatically track cart additions, purchase values, and customer lifetime value without manual setup.

Metrics: Turning Events into Actionable Numbers

Once your events are flowing, Metrics let you quantify them in meaningful ways. Kissmetrics provides a library of pre-built metric templates that you simply plug your own events into. This is a massive time saver compared to Google Analytics, where getting similar insights often requires complex configuration.

A standout example: the "average times an event happens before a conversion" metric. Want to know how many times someone visits your site before they actually sign up? In Google Analytics, extracting that data is possible but painful. In Kissmetrics, you just select your visit event and your signup event, create the metric, and you're done. The platform handles the heavy lifting of correlating individual user journeys across multiple sessions.

Populations: Segmenting Your Audience

Where Metrics focus on numbers, Populations focus on people. Think of them as custom audience segments built from behavioral data. You can create populations based on events (people who filled out a specific form), properties (people in a certain country or on a certain device), or even membership in other populations — allowing you to build subsegments of subsegments.

The condition builder is flexible. You can require that users match all conditions, some conditions, or conditions in a specific order (perfect for funnel analysis). Conditions can use AND logic (did X and Y) or OR logic (did X or Y), and you can layer in frequency and time constraints like "visited at least three times in the last seven days."

Once a population is built, you get a people list that can be exported — handy for importing into your email marketing tool to target specific segments. You also get segmentation options to drill further into the population by properties, an activity feed showing real-time behavior within that group, and trend data to see whether the population is growing or shrinking over time.

Reports and Dashboards

Kissmetrics includes a solid set of reporting tools, though access depends on your tier. All tiers get activity reports and funnel reports. Tier 2 and Tier 3 unlock the revenue report and cohort report, while the A/B test report is exclusive to Tier 3. Each report type includes a brief explainer video if you want to understand what it tracks before diving in.

Activity reports are generated by default and cover the basics: country of origin, campaign sources, page views, and similar data. Funnel reports let you map out multi-step user journeys and identify where people drop off — essential for optimizing signup flows or checkout processes.

Dashboards tie everything together by letting you pin multiple reports into a single view. Pin your page views widget next to your country of origin breakdown, and you've got a quick morning check-in dashboard. One caveat: reports update once every 24 hours, so dashboards won't show live data. It's a "check in the morning and plan your day" tool rather than a real-time monitor.

The Upsell: Engage and Campaigns

Kissmetrics has built a smart upsell into the platform: Engage and Campaigns, available for $1,000 per year. This turns Kissmetrics from a pure analytics tool into an analytics-plus-action platform where you can trigger campaigns based on user behavior. It's not cheap, but if you're already investing in Kissmetrics data, being able to act on it within the same platform has real appeal.

This upsell is also the reason the lifetime deal exists in the first place. Kissmetrics can afford to offer generous one-time pricing on the analytics side because a portion of those users will eventually upgrade. It's a sustainable model that benefits both the company and the deal buyers — exactly how lifetime deals should work.

Final Verdict: Is the Kissmetrics Lifetime Deal Worth It?

Kissmetrics fills a gap that Google Analytics leaves wide open: understanding individual user behavior rather than just aggregate traffic numbers. If you've ever wanted to know exactly what a specific visitor did on your site, how many times they came back before converting, or which segment of your audience is most valuable, Kissmetrics makes that easy in a way GA simply doesn't.

The AppSumo lifetime deal makes this even more compelling. At $59 for Tier 1, you're getting a tool that normally costs $2,400 per year. Even Tier 3 at the top end is a fraction of what you'd pay annually. The fact that Kissmetrics is an established company with a clear monetization path (the Engage upsell) means this deal has real staying power.

For e-commerce operators running WooCommerce or Shopify stores, the combination of Kissmetrics' people-first analytics and the available integrations makes this particularly powerful. For content sites and lead generation businesses, the event tracking and population features alone justify the price. If you've been looking for a reason to move beyond Google Analytics, this is it.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.