Product Analytics is nothing to do with Marketing Analytics

Mahesh Gajjelli
4 min readJan 28, 2021

We are in confusing times and more we try to make a niche for ourselves; we choose to give names to make it look adaptive and sensible. By saying this I am not taking away the logic around the names, but it confuse damn a lot for normal people. Old days were good for everything damn around Analytics was Analytics and easiest way to be module wise analytics, like purchase analytics or sales analytics or procurement analytics.

So, what’s confusion about Product Analytics?

Without adding more confusion, I am talking about tech here and for me Product is web or mobile apps. Product analytics helps you understand how user are interacting and adopting your product. With digital footprints available, it is easier to track user events and actions. This helps draw use cases like funnel retention, segmentation, feature friction, and most complicated is to do user journey.

Product analytics solely focuses on software product. It can be SaaS or digital asset of BFSI, e-Com and enterprise. It can even help Fintech. The goal is to provide insights to your decision makers and give them a big picture about the product.

It can further get as complex as to find your newly gained customers will stay long or you can have a cohort of best users to identify their common characteristics and most used features.

Marketing Analytics relies on your website traffic or cart abandoning. It works tirelessly around social media, search engine and affiliation.

Why Digital Marketing Analytics is different:

Digital Marketing Analytics is to measure the success of activities to get traffic. It collects data from sales perspective features on your digital assets. Here are main goals of Marketing Analytics platforms:

· Find the effectiveness of marketing channels and campaigns.

· Give enough data to understand general usefulness of the website and interesting sections to improve.

· Just enough flexibility to find Call To Action button performances.

· General segmentation of website traffic to understand broad audience to further fine tune the campaigns.

With this, marketers see the opportunities to improve their activities.

Marketing Analytics stands out more essential if you ask in sense of ROI and the key metrics guide is the strategy around marketing activities.

Product Analytics works on experience by understanding their users’ journey and by observing every action that they take on Product.

Collection of data for Product Analytics:

The most important part for such analytics is how and what data your analytics tool is collecting. It is based on user interaction with Product and its features. Product analytics collect feature information minutely. Like the clicks, how much time spent on the page to every action on the web or mobile app.

Normally we jump on use cases and talk about KPIs and visualization. I am not saying that Marketing Analytics tools are not useful, but these tools will fail completely with product analytics. The main goal of product analytics are:

· Understand which users are interested in the product and which are not.

· Is product getting used as it is expected to? Which are the features that are driving force of the applications.

· Understand frictions that people are facing to use certain features.

· Segment users not only based on their personal dimensions but also on their usage patterns.

· Find out the success metrics in a user journey.

· Attach application performance as a UX parameter as well.

The next important aspect is also how easy it is to implement because the more you need to do on engineering side is the more you skip the implementation. It is necessary to understand the ease of doing it and with more Product Heads non-tech; it makes paramount that you have easy to implement Product Analytics.

The stand out use cases of Product Analytics are:

· Cohorts Analytics

· Feature usage Analytics

· Feature friction Analytics

· User Journey

· Feature blue print

· Hygiene Analytics

· Trial conversion funnel

· Account based analytics for B2B

Conclusion:

With such a complication to do Product Analytics for both tech and use cases wisely, you can’t do Product Analytics with Marketing Analytics platforms. You can tweak every bit of Marketing Analytics like Google Analytics, but how it is going to tell your engineering team about data collection to such minute level.

There are great, good and costly Product Analytics platforms available, but one thing I look forward is www.fibotalk.com

I am sure this content will help and my suggestion will drive your Product Analytics to grow your tech business in the right direction.

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