What are digital analytics?

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 are digital analytics important?

Why does tracking digital analytics data matter for product teams? Let’s check out a few of the main reasons.

Enables decision-makers to make data-driven decisions

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.

Provides insights into user behavior and pain points

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.

Identifies friction points in the customer journey

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.

Examples of digital analytics data

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.

Web analytics data

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:

• Number of new users/unique users vs. returning ones.
• Acquisition channel (direct, organic search, organic social, referral).
• Page views.
• Time on the website.
• Bounce rate – % of sessions with no engagement.
• Demographics (country, city, language, age, gender).
• Technology (device, operating system, platform).
• Conversion rates.

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.

Product data

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?

• You can track product or feature usage with feature tagging, heatmaps, or session recordings.
• For activation data, you can track goals or carry out funnel analysis.
• Funnels and paths allow you to map out all the routes users take to reach a key stage.
• Heatmaps let you track customer interactions with your product’s different features.

Customer data

You can collect customer data in the form of customer feedback. Customer feedback data tracking is essential to build successful products.

There are a few types of user feedback you could be collecting:

• User onboarding feedback – on how easy it is to start using the product.
• Product feedback – on how well it satisfies user needs.
• Feature requests.
• Customer sentiment and satisfaction feedback (NPS and CSAT surveys).
• Customer experience feedback (CES surveys).
• Product viability feedback (PMF surveys).
• Bug reports.

Digital marketing data

Apart from the website, marketing relies a lot on social media channels and email marketing.

What data could you track?

Social media

• Follower demographics (just like website analytics).
• Engagement (likes, comments, shares, retweets, etc.)
• Reach (how many people see the content) and impressions (how many times it’s displayed).
• Hashtag analysis (which of them is most effective).
• Competitor performance analysis.

Email marketing

• Open rate (% of users who opened the email).
• Click-through rate (% of users who clicked on a link, for example, a CTA).
• Conversion rate (% of users who completed specific goals, like a purchase or demo booking).
• Bounce rate (% of undelivered emails).
• Unsubscribe rate (% of people who unsubscribe from your mailing list).

Tracking this kind of data helps you assess the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and design marketing strategies that drive your product goals.

How to build a digital analytics strategy

Designing and delivering your digital strategy consists of 5 main steps. Let’s go over each of them.

Define your objectives

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.

Choose the right KPIs and metrics

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.

Choose the right digital analytics tool

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:

• Website traffic and email marketing – Google Analytics.
• SEO performance – Semrush, Ahrefs.
• Product analytics platform – Userpilot, Heap, Amplitude.

We’re looking at some of them in more detail in the final section.

Define data sources

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 qualitative and quantitative data

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.

While qualitative data, including user surveys, and usability testing, offers deeper insights into user preferences and motivations.

Analyze data for actionable insights

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.

Couple the drop-off point with an in-app survey to identify the reason behind the drop-off.

Create product and marketing strategies based on valuable insights

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.

Best digital analytics tools

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: Best digital analytics tool for collecting customer and product data

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:

• Chrome extension – so that you can tag features and create events to track without any coding.
• Feature usage tracking – not just clicks but also hovers and text input.

• Custom event tracking – to track multiple user actions as if they were one.
• User segmentation – you can group users based on multiple properties for in-depth analysis and personalized engagement.
• Funnel analytics – to analyze conversions at different stages of the user journey and identify friction.

• Path analysis – to map out all user actions leading up to or following an event.

• Trend analysis – so that you can easily track changes in key metrics.

• Retention analysis – to analyze patterns in user churn over time.

• Dashboards – overviews of selected metrics related to specific aspects of product performance.

• Heatmaps – for easy visualization of user engagement with feature and UI elements.
• Dedicated NPS dashboard – with insights from the NPS surveys.
• A/B and multivariate testing for in-app flows.
• Flow analytics – enabling you to track the performance of your onboarding flows and UI patterns.

• Webhooks and integrations with major analytics tools and CRM systems, like Amplitude, HubSpot, and hot off the press, Salesforce.

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 pricing

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:

• Starter: The entry-level Starter plan starts at $249/month and includes features like segmentation, product analytics, reporting, user engagement, NPS feedback, and customization.
• Growth: The Growth plan starts at $749/month and includes features like resource centers, advanced event-based triggers, unlimited feature tagging, AI-powered content localization, EU hosting options, and a dedicated customer success manager.
• Enterprise: The Enterprise plan uses custom pricing and includes all the features from Starter + Growth plus custom roles/permissions, access to premium integrations, priority support, custom contract, SLA, SAML SSO, activity logs, security audit, and compliance (SOC 2/GDPR).

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LogRocket: Best digital analytics tool for mobile apps

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:

• Mobile and web session replays (recordings).
• Tables and time series – for tracking changes in user behavior over time.
• Conversion funnel insights.
• Path analysis.
• Heatmaps, scroll maps & click maps.
• Cohort analysis.
• Retention charts.
• 40+ out-of-the-box integrations, including Zendesk, Salesforce, Optimizely, Qualtrics, and Jira.

LogRocket pricing

LogRocket offers 4 plans:

• Free
• Team – from $69/month
• Professional – from $295/month
• Enterprise – custom pricing

Google Analytics: Best digital analytics tool for collecting web analytics data

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:

• Event data tracking – (as opposed to user sessions in General Analytics).
• Cross-platform tracking – you can track data across different devices and platforms, including mobile and web apps.
• Custom dashboards and reporting.
• User segmentation (user, session, and event-based).
• Predictive analytics – ML-powered predictions and forecasts, like potential segment revenue or purchase likelihood.
• Industry-standard analysis types, including user engagement analysis, funnel analysis, path analysis, and retention analysis.
• Integrations – including major analytics platforms, BI tools (Tableau, Looker, Power BI), and CRMs (Salesforce, HubSpot).

Google Analytics pricing

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.

Conclusion

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!

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