Product Analytics in a Nutshell

A Brief Introduction From a Marketing and Business Analytics Perspective

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What is Product Analytics?

Why Product Analytics?

Product Analytics vs. Marketing Analytics

  • Product analytics focuses on solving market problems by providing useful customer insights and accordingly improving the products. It is more technical and user-centric. In contrast, marketing analytics focuses on generating revenue for the business with effective messaging and exploring ways to increase conversion rates. It is physiological and sales-centric.
  • Product analytics ensures a great user experience by providing useful insights to the product teams on how users interact and navigate various parts of the product. It emphasizes more the user experience than their actions. On the other hand, marketing analytics focuses more on user actions than experience. It relies on diagnostic and predictive analytics, measuring key actionable and exploratory metrics.
  • Performing marketing analytics typically leads to developing effective messaging, positioning, and implementing key market strategies. Product analytics leads to new product requirements, code changes, or sometimes pivots.
  • While performing product analytics, you may deal with confidential information about the users. The data should be handled carefully as it affects the company’s policies and legal boundaries. On the other side, marketing analytics stays away from user-specific data and can be accessible to others in the company.

Product Analytics vs. Business Analytics

  • Goes beyond the scope of any particular product. It deals with the organization-level data collected from various sources such as markets, products, services, finance, and human resources to analyze business trends.
  • It uses predictive analytical techniques such as data mining, modelling, and machine learning to determine the likelihood of future outcomes to help business leaders as they are always looking for threats and opportunities.
  • Provides insights to the business leaders as to whether a company should develop a new product line or prioritize one project over another.
  • Focuses on the overall function and day-to-day operation of the business.

Tools for Product Analytics

1. Google Analytics

Best Known For

  • all types of cloud-based applications
  • personal and business websites
  • businesses of all sizes to track users’ behaviours and customers interactions
  • digital marketing
  • Startups

2. Mixpanel

Best Known For

  • account level product analytics
  • landing page optimization
  • SaaS web apps
  • temporal analysis of user activities
  • integrating segmentation
  • A/B Testing

3. Amplitude

Best Known For

  • mobile app analytics
  • for creating different cohorts based on the custom events tracked and the segments of users
  • using heat maps and funnels
  • startups (with their great trial version product)
  • A/B testing

4. Segment

Best Known For

  • developing Customer Data Platforms to support expandability, data enrichment, and multiple devices
  • creating chart diagrams, and flowcharts for users
  • custom-built websites

5. Heap Analytics

Best Known For

  • simplified functionality to track clicks, events, and user journey
  • generating heat maps
  • user-level product analytics
  • segmentation optimization

6. Snowplow

Best Known For

  • Big Data processing and distribution with integration to Hadoop
  • business intelligence with capabilities for data modelling and transformation
  • collecting high-quality event data
  • product analytics on multiple platforms and channels (including IoT) with our range of first-party trackers

7. Looker

Best Known For

  • Business Intelligence and data visualization
  • self-serve user-defined dashboards
  • quickly and easily integrating data from across data sources into a single view
  • data modelling and blending
  • column data filtering
  • user-friendly interface for reporting

8. Baremetrics

Best Known For

  • simplified SaaS product analytics
  • payment, revenue, churn, and cohort analysis
  • intuitive dashboards

9. Pendo

Best Known For

  • account and user-level product analytics
  • click reporting
  • feature-based user engagement
  • in-app guides and NPS tracking

10. Adobe Analytics

Best Known For

  • custom event tracking
  • session-based analytics for digital marketing
  • tracking user interactions and conversions
  • cloud-based solutions
  • good reporting tools

11. Profitwell

Best Known For

  • customer success monitoring
  • SaaS product analytics
  • business analytics and improving customer retention
  • customer payments tracking

12. Gainsight PX

Best Known For

  • simplified integration for both mobile and web apps
  • better user engagement and improving conversions
  • multi-language support
  • integrated surveys and text-bubble walkthroughs

13. Smartlook

Best Known For

  • replaying sessions
  • replaying mouse movements and click tracking
  • ability to create heatmaps with historical data
  • segmentation
  • analyzing e-commerce sites
  • providing insights to the UI/UX designers
  • collecting data for qualitative analysis

Closing

Further Reading

  1. 5 Top Analytics Tools That Are Product Managers’ Best Friends — by Donald Fomby
  2. Business Intelligence or Business Analytics — By Tableau
  3. Product Analytics — By ProductPlan

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Product Manager and Certified Scrum Product Owner https://arjunken.com

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