What is product analytics?

Product analytics is the process of identifying and analyzing the behaviors, actions, and signals your users trigger within your product or service. Product analytics is what enables product, growth, and marketing teams to track engagement, retention, and patterns of use among users in order to run experiments, glean insights, and course-correct the product roadmap, GTM strategies, etc.

Sure, oil is the new oil, but ‘90s kids will remember the days when data was the new oil. Whether you build a product or a digital experience, you inevitably desire to know who uses it and how. Discovering the end user's behavior and their problems is critical to enhancing the performance of your service and turning it into a superior choice for your customers. Product analytics is crucial in today's highly competitive marketplace, where there's simply no scope for guesswork and speculation regarding the effectiveness of your service. It provides you vital insights about the features your customers use and how you can optimize them, so it truly captivates your audience.

Product Analytics Tools for Product-led Growth Businesses

The high level of competitiveness between SaaS companies today has necessitated the emergence of the product-led growth (PLG) business model. It helps create an offering designed to acquire and retain customers. Put simply, PLG facilitates the creation of a viral product without spending time on marketing it extensively. PLG is the future of user acquisition and expansion for SaaS companies. 

As a product-led business, you require powerful analytics tools in your growth stack. They allow you to gain crucial insights into how your users utilize your product, where they get stuck, and when they decide to forego your product. You gain much-needed visibility into your product’s usage, and are able to add color to your large volume of top of funnel users.

The Top Product Analytics Tools for Product-led Growth

According to The Analytics Advantage, a survey by Deloitte Analytics, 96 percent of companies feel that analytics will become highly significant to their organizations within the coming three years. 49 percent of respondents say that one of the chief benefits of employing analytics lies in better decision-making abilities. 

In light of this, having a diverse analytics tech stack with purpose-built tools is essential to successfully assess your development efforts. 

Here's a list of the best solutions for product-analytics.

1.  Amplitude 

Amplitude ranks as the number 1 product analytics solution according to the G2 Winter 2022 Report. The software helps you understand how visitors engage with your website through custom behavior reports and notifications. 

The event segmentation function of the solution shows how the end-users are interacting with your product. Through Amplitude dashboards, you can gain a complete picture of relevant visualizations. To get insights into the efficiency with which your customers are navigating an event path in your product, you can use the funnel analysis chart. These features make it one of the best solutions that fulfill the needs of today's product and growth teams. 

2.  Mixpanel 

Marketing teams and high-growth businesses can leverage growth analytics and make better decisions using Mixpanel. The tool helps you find the most popular features of your product, the moments where the users drop off, and those that retain best. 

So, essentially, you measure what precisely matters and create better than before products through insights and data. Mixpanel is a self-serve product analytics solution through which teams can effortlessly analyze the hows and whys behind customer engagement, conversion, and retention in real-time.

3.  Heap Analytics

Heap is an easy-to-implement solution that provides full access to past data. You can refine your data with CRM systems, A/B Testing, and email providers. Just by installing a snippet, you can automatically capture every swipe, click, page view, and fill from every one of your visitors. 

The full data set you have in front of you gives accurate answers to all your questions. Heap Connect syncs all behavioral data automatically to your warehouse. You can use it to fuel your reporting with a complete set of behavioral data in Tableau, Looker, and the like. Moreover, you can create a centralized view of your visitors by combining Heap data with other sources. All of it is achieved with minimal engineering requirements.

4.  Pendo 

Pendo is a powerful product analytics software through which you can track user behavior across internal apps, mobile, and web. You don't need any specialized skills to access it. It's ideal for customer-focused product teams with their own tools that need to map engagement statistics. 

Any team can acquire data about how their tool is used and unlock crucial insights to power product-led growth. The tool helps you gain clear signals about areas of optimization and user experience for every segment. As a result, you can build features that deliver the highest value.

5.  CleverTap

Acquisition and retention are the two most important product-led growth metrics. Well, that's exactly what CleverTap enables you to measure. It makes it easy to gain real-time insights through its in-app analytics and marketing abilities. This enables you to better understand how users interact with your products. 

With CleverTap, you can manage omnichannel campaigns according to user behavior, lifestyle, stage, and location. It's also ideal for drip and trigger-based campaigns and personalization initiatives. Overall, it's the perfect solution for marketers wanting to build differentiated customer engagement strategies to fuel growth. 

6.  Segment 

Do you feel reluctant to gather several data sources because of the impossibility of storing them in a single place? The desire for a central hub to see data in the context of a larger picture is understandable. To resolve this problem, you can use Segment, a customer data platform. It simplifies data collection with a single API that gathers, cleans, and activates data from mobile applications, web, and servers. 

This top-notch data management tool is easy to set up. The software eliminates the enormous time needed to build and keep integrations. It links all the data seamlessly together. Put simply; this data management platform unifies customer data for marketing, A/B testing, and robust product analytics.

7.  Glassbox 

According to Yaron Morgenstern, CEO of Glassbox, comprehending the significance of digital customer experience is a vital starting point. But efficiently implementing a dynamic organization-wide digital customer strategy isn't easy. It's exactly here that Glassbox proves its mettle. 

The AI-enabled analytics that the solution provides enables product managers to clearly visualize customer journeys and gain insights into their struggles. As a result, they can better solve problems hindering their growth while improving the user experience.

The tool functions in real-time across mobile and websites. It leverages Big Data, application monitoring, behavioral analytics, and Machine Learning to allow companies to find both what their customers are doing and why they are doing it. Thus, it helps enterprises achieve two significant business priorities, customer acquisition, and better customer relationships.  

8.  LogRocket 

LogRocket is undoubtedly one of the best product analytics tools for all customer success professionals. The dominant consensus as per the Gartner Peer Insights reviews of this product is that it's one of the simplest ways to acquire unbelievable customer insights. 

It's a cloud-based solution for session replay, which helps companies track bugs, monitor performance, and inspect actions. Using it, engineers can monitor current or new elements or issues, generate user-related issues, and also set alerts to monitor disparities in time series metrics. The platform helps track funnel conversions, event volumes, and user flows and actively surfaces problems that hinder service use and conversion. Put plainly; you find what your users desire and need and how to build them. 

9.  Gainsight  

It is the product analytics tool that Box, the leading content management and collaboration platform, uses to fuel customer satisfaction, adoption, and expansion. Recognizing happy customers is crucial for companies as they showcase progressive revenue opportunities. With Gainsight, you get the visibility and the workflow to enhance the revenue value of your current users. 

Features like retention analysis let you find out those product functionalities that prompt retention among your customer sections. With funnel analysis, you can identify those steps that your users are getting stuck on. The query builder allows you to monitor particular events and multiple user cohorts. This growth analytics tool offers a full 360-degrees view into the engagement of a company's user base. Use this tool to turn your silos of customer data into a clearly visible customer intelligence platform to find opportunities for enhancing customer adoption and fuelling up-sell revenue. 

10. Totango  

Churn, customer success, retention, and renewal are the most vital KPIs of any customer success manager. This role is burgeoning as the software industry moves collectively to SaaS. Naturally, the most critical tool in this scenario is a powerful customer success analytics platform like Totango. It should definitely be a part of a SaaS company's product analytics tech stack as it fully focuses on finding and tracking leading indicators that aid in predicting at-risk customers. Through it, you can become proactive in driving positive customer experiences.

It offers features like 360 degree customer analysis views, data hubs, segmentation, and customer health scores. Additionally, you can measure customer journeys and know your customers well by analyzing across onboarding, renewals, and account upgrades. Leverage its deep segmentation and analytics abilities to identify trends across your user base, form benchmarks, and assess account and user profiles.

Power Product-led Growth through Product Analytics

Recently, there's been a steady shift to quantifiable product analytics data as marketing teams gain access to varied resources. This data is heavily unbiased, thoroughly reliable, and effortlessly scalable as your customer base expands. Powerful analytics tools give you a perspective into your own offerings that may seem unimaginable to you. The tools mentioned in this list, by providing critical data, guide product managers and growth teams in making the best decisions. They have easy-to-use features, so product teams can use them efficiently. The large swathes of behavioral data is a goldmine for growth teams to run their GTM experiments with the goal of monetization, using additional tools like Toplyne to monetize their product-led growth. Moreover, their tight integrations with other solutions used by development teams daily make them the best platforms for creating customer-centric, optimized products and GTM playbooks that help PLG companies meet their monetization goals.

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