Product analysis software helps managers and product owners to analyze product performance in terms of key performance indicators like visits, engagement, interactions, behavior patterns, etc., to improve the overall product experience and achieve business goals.
The main purpose of product analysis software is to infer product advantages based on data by engaging users.
Difference between Product Analytics and Web Analytics
Product analysis and web analytics help companies achieve their business goals, although the two methods differ significantly in their approach.
Product analysis focuses on a company’s products or services and collects data from multiple sources to identify customer behavior. This process aims to provide decision-makers with an idea of how customers interact with the product and improve the product or service.
Product analytics software provides data insights to demonstrate accurate customer behavior. Facts based on this data can be used to improve user experience, improve features, ensure your roadmap is aligned with user needs, increase acceptance and conversions. They can also provide insightful information, tools for more automation and visualization, and much more.
Web analytics is the process of measuring and analyzing how people (web traffic) come to a website and how they move to different web pages. These procedures are carried out in order to improve website efficiency, increase business reach and optimize web usage.
Difference between Google Analytics (GA) or Product analytics (PA) software
Google Analytics (GA) is a website analytics software. It tracks specific user behavior of a website and provides metrics related to page views, sessions, number of unique visitors, average time per page, etc.
Without a doubt, GA provides great statistics for free that help website owners optimize their websites for more web traffic. GA provides metrics by analyzing anonymous traffic, while Product Analytics (PA) uses more realistic user behavior data.
Limitation of Google Analytics(GA) over Product Analytics (PA) software
- GA provides an overview of the event as a whole, making it difficult to see what users were doing before and after the drop point
- Non-HTML content such as PDF downloads, video views, form submissions, etc., cannot be traced.
- No access to raw data: GA provides hard-to-analyze custom data for detailed insights
- Lack of data visibility due to some users having cookies and JavaScript disabled in their browser limitation of Google Analytics collection tags, libraries, and SDKs. Exact numbers can be found on the Google site.
- GA cannot process PII (Personally Identifiable Information) data. Therefore, it is impossible to determine the value that certain users receive from your product.
- No dedicated customer service or support in GA
- PA provides useful information to your users based on broken features and helps optimize efficient features. By knowing what consumers do, how they interact with features, and what they love most about your product, you can engage them longer, retain them, and sell more.
There are many more features and benefits of adopting PA, which we will discuss in the following section.
Importance of Product Analytics software
Product analysis is an important part of a company’s product management practice because most applications are not designed to generate detailed reports for themselves. Without analytics, usage data is often misinterpreted and inconsistent. Product analytics software makes unstructured data actionable by integrating all data sources into one organized view. Below are a few more advantages of PA:
- Quality Data: Product analysis platforms allow product teams to analyze information in greater depth than is possible in interviews, surveys, and discussions, which are prone to human error.
- Features Implementation: While implementing product analytics is useful for companies looking to understand how their customers use existing product features, it is also helpful for testing new features and evaluating user experience. When a team has a goal for how many new features to use, they can use the data provided by product analytics to work towards that goal.
- Customer retention: In recent years, technology companies focused on application development have found that product analysis is one of the most effective ways to increase customer retention and optimize a company’s position in a competitive market.
Let’s now look at some of the best product analytics tools.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel helps you understand user behavior to make better decisions about your SaaS applications.
It provides event-based product analysis that tracks specific user interactions in real-time to effectively identify trends and understand consumer behavior.
User data security is paramount, so this software provides privacy tools for data compliance and international data transfer regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and others.
Its event-based approach captures a deeper understanding of user engagement, enabling more detailed analysis and more effective targeting of messages and experiments.
To protect customer privacy, the software team utilizes development methods including built-in SOC 2 Type II certification, role control, and advanced encryption.
Interactive reports offer full visualization of comprehensive user-specific data such as which users stay for how long, grouping users by behavior, linking user behavior leading to long-term retention, where and why consumers quit, etc.
The detailed level analysis includes user concepts, events, and properties to provide in-depth and applicable analysis of user-specific tasks. Examples of users, events, and properties are as below.
Features
- Impact report to determine the successful launch
- Custom properties with easy-to-use formulas without the need for a development team
- Easily sync Mixpanel data with the rest of your interoperability stack
- Dashboards summarize product adoption, retention, or other custom metrics
- Identify key user paths to eliminate friction
Mixpanel is a simple but powerful product analysis software to convert, engage and retain more users. The free version is available for 100,000 users.
GoodData
GoodData provides a BI (Business Intelligence) platform to create and deliver product analysis that helps create data strategies for designing new products to increase a company’s ROI (Return on Investment).
Easy-to-use adaptive dashboards help any manager create their own new reports and customize visualizations, customize dashboards, and more without formal training.
Its flexible architecture allows enterprises to seamlessly integrate into existing infrastructure and easily deliver analytical solutions for employees, customers, or business partners.
Integration is also possible with various data warehouses and databases such as AWS Redshift, BigQuery, Snowflake, PostgreSQL, Vertica.
GoodData provides the highest level of data security by adopting industry best practices and advanced technology. This platform uses multiple layers of protection with global standards such as GDPR-S, SOC2, PII, ISO, CCPA, etc.
Features
- Protect business and consumer data with Enterprise Security and Shield
- Easily embed via iframes and customize dashboards, charts, and analytics
- The platform can be used on-premises and in the cloud
- Scalability can be in all directions, such as data volume, cost, and users, without sacrificing data speed and IT flexibility.
GoodData can be provided free of charge with a limited interval of 5 workspaces. Pricing models are based on features and data volume, not users or queries.
Woopra
Woopra is an advanced customer analytics software that generates real-time consumer behavior data. It helps companies analyze customer lifecycles by automatically creating detailed profiles.
Centralized views create granular customer journey data such as web activity, page views, device type, email activity, help desk, payments, support, and many other customer actions.
Its customizable reports help companies examine customer touchpoints and related results to demonstrate brand equity and stimulate product innovation.
The Woopra platform allows third-party tools such as Dropbox and Mailchimp to integrate business data or share insights across various teams in the organization.
Features
- Three-dimensional models to present data to customers that are rarely seen in the equation
- Track unlimited custom actions automatically.
- Dynamic triggers can be created based on user behavior data
- Schedule accounts to perform powerful automated actions like data sync, email list export, add/update subscriptions, and more
The Woopra platform offers a unique user experience through behavioral data analysis to provide marketing and support teams with a unique and high-quality experience to achieve organizational goals. The software is free to use for up to 500,000 actions/month, and after exceeding the limit, you will be prompted to upgrade.
Pendo
Pendo helps companies understand how consumers perceive their product attributes and take different paths through the product, ultimately leading to better business insights.
It is used by Fortune 500 companies, B2B technology startups, educational institutions, and healthcare systems to expand the adoption of software products.
Its uniqueness is that it combines in-app messaging with powerful product analysis and user feedback that helps people successfully adapt to the software without much effort.
This platform helps product teams collaborate on qualitative and quantitative insights to make informed decisions about customer support throughout their product journey.
In short, Pendo helps companies get an overview of their products, such as what features do customers use and ignore? Which option is best to click on and which feature creates friction, etc. This will help the company eliminate trouble spots for customers and create new products.
The platform also helps organize in-app messages, manuals, and instructions without coding to get maximum product value.
Features
- Easy and fast user orientation also helps set goals to align business results.
- Easily track, capture, and prioritize feature requests from customers
- Data insights to understand customer behavior to identify revenue-generating activities
- Comprehensive customer support mechanisms that promote customer satisfaction, reduce costs and build customer competence
Pendo software helps companies deliver better product experiences by driving innovation for happier, more productive users. It can be used by up to 1000 active users per month without any cost.
Indicative
Indicative is a product analytics platform, which offers an integrated view of the customer journey across all data sources and marketing channels.
The scalability of Indicative’s architecture allows you to connect to your existing data sources via storage/lake, CDP, or directly from your website or mobile app.
Its unique multi-funnel technology helps visualize and predict which customers are key to acquiring and identifying friction points across different customer segments for retention.
The software tracks the customer journey from end to end, including common paths, mapping to understand customer behavior, building funnels for customer movement in products and understanding friction points where customers fail, and many other indicators that help create better products and increase customer satisfaction.
Features
- KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) can be tracked and shared among different teams.
- Fully customized dashboard with automatic updates
- Different segmentation to analyze customer behavior
- Group analysis to enable and identify repeat customer behavior
Trusted by startups and companies of all sizes, the indicative platform is best suited for product managers, retailers, and data analysts. The standard version is free for 3 users and offers 25 million events per month.
Amplitude
Amplitude is a $2 billion Nasdaq-listed company and a pioneer in digital product intelligence. It is ranked #1 in G2 Product Analytics and is used by 26 of the Fortune 100 companies.
The main task of amplitude analysis is to understand customers in terms of behavior, personality, and engagement and improve their experience by identifying friction points and tracking their path.
It analyzes results by understanding conversions and increasing customer retention through product innovation.
The platform connects digital products directly to customers. It increases the value of digital investments by knowing indicators that go beyond the surface level (page views and clicks), such as user attributes, most used features, high-value customers, people engagement, conversion, etc.
Features
- Behavioral Cohorts to get a better picture of the exact user behavior
- Easy integration with 3rd party platforms like Amazon, AppsFlyer, Apptimize, Google Play, iTunes, mParticle, and more
- World-class data management and compliance standards ensure data security and reliability
- Baseline indicators help in research, learning, and forecasting
- ML (machine learning) to predict outcomes over time and determine the likelihood of consumers buying, rejecting, etc.
This leading digital product intelligence software is recommended for product managers, retailers, and developers. The free version is available for unlimited user location and data storage but only tracks 10 million actions per month.
Countly
Countly is the world’s leading product analytics platform, helping to track product performance and measure innovation to improve customer experience and meet business goals.
Its vast reach tracks over 1.5 billion unique identities across more than 16,000 applications and leverages over 2,000 servers worldwide.
Its innovative platform captures real-time application usage and click behavior from platforms such as mobile, desktop, web applications, and websites and presents statistics in a visual format to analyze user behavior.
Real-time statistics like views, entry and exit pages, bounces, page time, heatmaps, etc., are tracked and projected on the dashboard.
To expand the functionality and usability of the software, one can integrate various plugins related to user profiles, advanced segmentation, behavior analysis, notifications, etc.
Features
- Custom building segmentation according to company needs
- It can be implemented in a corporate space or private cloud
- Using a checksum mechanism to verify data integrity
- Health and productivity counter checks the app for crashes and errors
The Community Edition is free to use but requires server hosting at an organizational fee, while the Enterprise Edition comes with premium plugins and comes with custom SLAs and can be hosted on-premises or in the cloud.
Heap
Heap consists of three main pillars: data analysis, data foundation, and data management. These three pillars help find who uses the product, segment interactions, identify friction in the product that leads to product improvement, stimulate, activate and maintain conversions, and get early signals for customer behavior change.
The heap automatically collects all user interactions, so there is no need to change code when new features are run, or reductions are made.
The data model is comprehensive, providing funnel analysis, retention analysis, user segmentation, behavioral groups, and more that help creates more valuable products to meet business goals.
Features
- Better tracking and data analysis to measure the entire customer journey
- Event Viewer allows you to define events without modifying raw data sets without coding
- Automatic data collection records customer interactions rather than deciding in advance which events to track
- Easily create custom reports and add them to the dashboard
Heap is one of the easiest platforms to set up for smaller and enterprise-level projects without an engineering team. This software can be used for free for up to 10,000 sessions/month with an unlimited user license.
Segment
Segment is used to collect data from multiple sources to understand the customer journey from the marketing and engineering team’s point of view to produce innovative products and track customer behavior to achieve goals.
The unify dashboard collects customer touchpoints from every resource for building results-driven journeys, such as continuous engagement, results-driven journeys, and omnichannel messaging.
Analyze real-time data segments to target the right customers and create real-time behavioral campaigns.
One of the main missions of this platform is the security and confidentiality of customer data, and it is processed with the best secure protocols, data encryption, domain identity management (SCIM), multi-factor authentication (MFA), to name a few.
Data collection can be funneled to 300+ other real-time marketing tools without any coding issues.
Features
- User events can be collected from any website, app, and repository with a simple analytics API
- Data sharing dictionaries are capable of synchronizing almost any organizational team.
- Real-time privacy assessment with regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and more
- Customer profiles can be segmented based on intent alerts based on real-time customer behavior with real-time stress lists
Segment platform is certified to industry standards, including ISO 27001, 27017, SOC 2 Type 2, etc. The platform is free to try but only supports 1000 visitors per month from two sources with 300+ integrations.
PostHog
PostHog is a versatile platform that companies of all sizes use to Monitor, track and analyze user behavior across websites and applications. Some of the world’s top companies, such as Combinator, Staples, Airbus, Outbrain, Phantom, QuestDB, etc., use PostHog.
The platform helps to gain performance insights into the website or app and helps to make data-driven decisions to drive overall growth.
PostHog offers features such as user tracking, event tracking, funnel analysis, retention analysis, cohort analysis, A/B testing, custom reporting, and more.
To extend the functionality of the platform, it allows you to build apps to connect to your data source with hundreds of third-party apps to fulfill your specific business requirements.
The platform has a huge open-source community of 60k plus developers and 10k plus GitHub stars.
PostHog has both open-source and paid versions. Large enterprises looking to adopt premium features can opt for the paid version for more advanced features such as Correlation analysis, Group analytics, Lifecycle cohorts, Network performance on recordings, A/B testing, Slack support, and many more.
Features
- Visualise user data using graphs, tables, charts, and maps.
- All event data from a website or web app is automatically captured.
- Set start and end points to see how users interact with your product, website, or conversion funnel.
- Group analytics about product usage.
- Session recording.
- Correlation analysis helps to determine how likely someone is to convert or churn.
PostHog is worth looking at if you’re looking for a comprehensive analytics tool. It is free with generous usage limits, but with limited features, you can switch to paid version for more advanced features.
How to select the best product analytics software to achieve the desired results?
The search for the best software is based on the product or service category, but in general, the following 7 points will help you choose the best one that fits your needs:
#1. Custom Event Tracking: Ability to capture custom events such as button clicks, form fills, page views, etc.
#2. Automatic Retrieval: It provides excellent relief for manual tracking teams as it overcomes the need to decide which events to track in advance. It also helps track trends.
#3. Low Code Reliability: Helps integrate tracking code easily and also makes management easier for non-technical staff
#4. Detention Reporting: Help predict consumer retention based on consumer actions, paths, and workflows
#5. Segmentation allows data to be analyzed based on specific criteria like demographics, normal behavior, etc.
#6. Third-party integrations for better optimization, visualization, and automation so the whole team benefits, e.g., B. Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Product Management, etc.
#7. Real-time data: Software that provides real-time information is preferable to software that takes several hours to read the data on the dashboard.
Conclusion 📈
The product analysis software described above performs best with good results.
Each tool is different and has unique features. It is not possible to get one tool that captures all functions, so it is essential to determine the specific needs of the organization or product and business objectives and choose the appropriate product analysis software.
You may also be interested in Data Analytics Courses.