What’s digital analytics? How can it help product and marketing teams make data-driven decisions and improve the user experience at different stages of the customer journey?
If you’re after answers to these questions, we’ve got you covered!
In this article, we also look at different kinds of digital analytics data, how to implement a digital analytics strategy and the best tools to help you do it!
Digital analytics is a powerful tool that enables businesses to decode user behavior and optimize their online presence effectively.
By meticulously gathering, measuring, and analyzing digital data from diverse sources, digital analytics empowers organizations to make informed decisions that drive growth and enhance user experience.
Why does tracking digital analytics data matter for product teams? Let’s check out a few of the main reasons.
In today’s digital landscape, utilizing digital analytics enables organizations to make data-driven decisions.
With its ability to allocate resources effectively and adapt to changing trends swiftly, digital analytics fosters accountability and drives continuous improvement. Ultimately, it serves as a compass, guiding organizations toward innovation and growth in the dynamic world of digital commerce.
Talking of pain, digital analytics helps you discover the pain points that your customers have.
By tracking customer behavior inside your product, you’re able to tell when and where they come across obstacles or which tasks they fail to complete. With such knowledge, you can look for ways to solve them and improve customer experience.
Or take keyword data as another example. Tracking the most popular keywords can help you optimize your product offer and digital marketing campaigns to meet unsatisfied market needs.
Friction is one of the common causes of customer pain. There’s nothing more frustrating than having to jump through one hoop after another, especially when trying to complete a simple task.
This means their progress along the customer journey will be painfully slow or it won’t happen at all and they will churn.
Tracking user progress enables you to find friction and drop-off points so that you can help them move on.
Digital analytics uses data from various sources. Which of them you should track depends on your goals. Let’s have a look at a few data examples and when they could be relevant.
Website data gives you insights into who visits your site and their behaviors once they are there. The metrics you could be looking at are:
Analyze data to optimize the website’s SEO performance, tweak your copy to better reflect the needs of your audience, and drive conversions.
Indirectly, when combined with other data, it can help you forecast revenue. For example, if you know your demo conversion rate, you’re able to predict how many leads will turn into paying customers and how much they’ll spend.
There’s a range of product metrics you may want to track and various techniques that you can use to do so.
What are some examples?
Track product usage data with dashboards
You can collect customer data in the form of customer feedback. Customer feedback data tracking is essential to build successful products.
Use customer profiles to collect customer data in one place
There are a few types of user feedback you could be collecting:
Apart from the website, marketing relies a lot on social media channels and email marketing.
What data could you track?
Social media
Email marketing
Tracking this kind of data helps you assess the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and design marketing strategies that drive your product goals.
Designing and delivering your digital strategy consists of 5 main steps. Let’s go over each of them.
Begin by clearly defining your business objectives and what you aim to achieve through digital analytics. Whether it’s increasing website traffic, improving feature adoption, or enhancing user engagement, align your analytics efforts with overarching business goals.
Example of a goal-setting framework
Identify key performance indicators (KPIs) that directly correlate with your objectives.
These could include metrics such as website traffic, conversion rates, bounce rates, average session duration, and churn rate.
Select KPIs that are relevant, measurable, and actionable.
Once you set your goals, it’s time to collect the required data. The kinds of metrics you want to track will affect the choice of software that you will use.
Here are a few possible choices:
We’re looking at some of them in more detail in the final section.
Determine the sources of data you’ll be collecting to gain insights into user behavior and interactions. This could include funnel analytics, behavior analytics, customer feedback, and customer relationship management (CRM) data. Integrate these data sources to gain a comprehensive view of user journeys.
Collect both qualitative and quantitative data to gain a holistic understanding of user behavior. Quantitative data, such as adoption rate, number of unique users, and user stickiness trend give you a performance overview.
Collect quantitative feature engagement data with Userpilot’s dashboards
While qualitative data, including user surveys, and usability testing, offers deeper insights into user preferences and motivations.
Create surveys code-free with Userpilot
Utilize digital analytics tools to analyze collected data and uncover actionable insights. Look for patterns, trends, and correlations within the data that can inform decision-making and strategy development.
Identify areas for optimization and improvement based on data-driven insights.
For example, if your goal is to improve the in-app customer journey, you can perform path analysis to identify where users experience friction.
Perform path analysis with ease in Userpilot
Couple the drop-off point with an in-app survey to identify the reason behind the drop-off.
Use the insights gleaned from digital analytics to inform the development of product and marketing strategies.
Tailor your offerings and messaging to better meet customer needs and preferences.
Optimize digital assets, such as website content and user experiences, to improve performance and drive desired outcomes.
We’ve previously mentioned a few tools that you could use for collecting digital analytics data. Let’s now look at a few of them in a bit more detail.
Userpilot is a product growth platform, so in addition to analytics features, it also allows you to collect customer feedback and design in-app experiences to engage and support users.
When I started writing for Userpilot, its analytics features were no match for its main competitors, not to mention dedicated analytics platforms.
Fast forward 2 years, and we’re looking at a completely different beast.
Here’s what it has to offer:
Funnel analysis in Userpilot.
Path analysis in Userpilot.
Trend analysis in Userpilot.
Retention analysis in Userpilot.
Product usage dashboard.
Flow analytics in Userpilot.
And we’re not done yet: expect session recordings in Q2 2024 for in-depth analysis of user interaction with product screens and pages.
Userpilot’s transparent pricing ranges from $249/month on the entry-level end to an Enterprise tier for larger companies.
Furthermore, Userpilot’s entry-level plan includes access to all UI patterns and should include everything that most mid-market SaaS businesses need to get started.
Userpilot has three paid plans to choose from:
LogRocket is a digital experience intelligence tool designed to help improve web application performance and user experience. It’s particularly valuable for developers, product managers, and UX designers seeking to optimize their web and mobile applications and create frictionless experiences.
LogRocket offers a decent set of analytics features:
Product analytics tools: LogRocket.
LogRocket offers 4 plans:
Google Analytics doesn’t need introductions, as it’s been a go-to web analytics platform for marketers for a while. Not everyone realizes though that Google Analytics 4, which launched in 2020, is a product analytics tool as well.
Here are the main features of GA4:
Google Analytics is free to use if you’re happy with the core features, which are more than adequate for most applications.
If you want to access the more advanced features, like attribution analysis, it gets a tad expensive. Google Analytics 360 costs $12,500 monthly.
Digital analytics enables teams to make data-driven decisions and shape their product and marketing strategies based on empirical evidence.
In practice, this means tracking website, product, marketing, and feedback data with appropriate tools, analyzing their behavior, and implementing the insights.
If you want to see how Userpilot can help you leverage digital analytics to make informed product decisions, book the demo!
