Product Analytics vs Marketing Analytics
What is product analytics?
Every company likes to retain their first-time users and get more out of them. Product analytics helps you in knowing critical information like percentage of users signed up and completed the action which you would like them to perform. Companies can focus on providing great user experience by understanding their users’ journey and by observing every action that they take on the website. With product onboarding funnel you can track some of the important metrics of your users’ action like, from the point they started learning about your product to the point of becoming your customers. Setting up these funnels helps you identify where your users are getting stuck in the onboarding process.
Product analytics provides a better understanding of your customers by how users interact with your product and also gives you valuable insights based on improving your product and shaping it better. Product data analytics works well only if a company has the certain measure of users since it is not advisable to make conclusions with the minimum amount of data. In case of a low customer base, conducting short surveys and asking for the user feedback definitely helps in identifying faults in your products ( if any ) and leaves you with worthful information of your product in customers perspective.
It is always good to track limited number events at the beginning and grow big with research and information present from its previous outcome. The minimum benchmark of users for your product is purely needed before you look into their actions thoroughly and for coming up with some important outcomes. This data helps you in making critical decisions in future like investment in marketing.
Product analytics tools & features
Tools like Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Kissmetrics gives you better opinions on improving your product. These tools help companies to track users digital footprints step-by-step. Using these you can get into the minds of your customers by looking through the action they make. Product Analytics features such as segmentation, funnels, cohorts are essential analytics concepts to be known.
1. Analytics segmentation :
Segmentation helps in providing a better overview of the particular set of events and lets you to choose specific properties that matters the most. It gives a detailed demographics of the individual event which are usually displayed in charts such as bar, line, and pie. Choose from the date range to equip you with best possible results and outcomes.
2. Cohorts analysis :
Rather than considering all users as one, it divides them into similar groups called cohorts. Cohort Analysis is a subdivision of behavioral analytics where it takes consideration of two different events. It lets you set up actions along with user properties, one at the start and other as a goal. With this, you can track insights like the number of days it took for your users to complete their second action and provides you with simplified information in charts. These charts usually separate the data as first time, recuring and addiction users.
3. Analytics funnels :
Funnels are created for better understanding of your users’ journey. It is usually a series of events which you would like your users to go through. Funnels help you to find users stuck up in the middle, dropped or completed the final step. By tracking critical insights like users dropping rate on each step you can quickly identify the reasons behind and make desired changes.
Marketers obstacle — Understanding product and marketing analytics
When it comes to analytics, marketers may often face a dilemma of understanding the concepts between product and marketing analytics. To make it clear, product analytics gives valuable insights into product usage, user experience and much more. while as in marketing analytics data helps you to create specified marketing campaigns for the users based on demographics such as name, age, and location. Product analytics tools like Mixpanel and Amplitude makes it simpler for you to understand users data and coming up with some better decisions on improving your product. On the other hand using typical marketing analytics tools like Google Analytics, Facebook, and Adobe analytics monitors your marketing campaigns and helps you to take better choices of investment in future.
So, which is better?
I consider saying both product and marketing analytics are important. Each has got its own perks as mentioned earlier. Using it together helps you to solve and take some of the critical decisions in your analytics journey.
Difference between product and marketing analytics
Product analytics Marketing analytics Used for Product improvement purposes.Used for marketing benefits, ROI oriented.User insights provide you with entire event history of a user in one place. This helps you to understand your user better.By creating specified marketing campaigns based on name, age, and location it helps you to set targeted marketing campaigns.Funnels & retentions help you to find where your users are dropping off on a path. This data helps you to track conversion rates for each event.By finding out which marketing channel works better for your users, you can spend each dollar as effectively as possible.Product analytics tools help you to take better decisions on improving your product by measuring and analysing your user behavior.Marketing analytics tools provide you with a focused overview of marketing campaigns. This helps you to build better marketing strategies.Product analytics tools eg: Mixpanel, amplitude, Kissmetrics.Marketing analytics tools eg: Google analytics, Facebook analytics, Adobe analytics.
How to get most out of product analytics tool (Mixpanel)
Why Mixpanel?
Mixpanel is a product analytics tool which helps you to track not only the page views but also all the actions that your users take on the website. Using this tool you can focus on providing better user experience, creating funnels, sending push notifications and much more.
Using Action Recorder you can track form submits, button clicks, event tracking and pretty much anything you like. The best part of using this is, it doesn’t require any coding knowledge. For present scenario, we would like to show you to solve shopping cart abandonment which is considered to be one of the biggest problems in E-commerce space.
“ Action Recorder has come up with the new Mixpanel Integration ”
Here we are going to set up abandoned cart tracking for an E-commerce using Action Recorder and with just click of a button you are free to send cart abandonment data to Mixpanel.
Step 1: Setting up Event tracking with Action Recorder
The account setup with action recorder is not going to take you more than a minute. All you need to do is to copy a small piece of JS code provided by Action Recorder and paste it under the head section of your website and save your changes. On returning back to Action Recorder click on “I have installed the code”. The next step is to Paste your website URL in Action Recorder and click on verify URL. You will receive a success message once you completed this step. Now you are ready to set up event tracking for your website.
For setting up cart abandonment tracking using Action Recorder, you are going to need “add to cart” and “checkout made” as the actions to be tracked. These two events help you in identifying users who have added products to cart on your website and didn’t complete the checkout process.
- E-commerce tracking — Add to cart
Choose action name as “added to cart” and action type as on click. Select add to cart by clicking on the pointing symbol. Next step is to choose your attributes. The attributes are the additional information displayed with the products when someone performs the action which you set for tracking. For the following example, I chose product name and product price to be displayed as the attributes when added to cart button is clicked. The final step is to step up tracking between current page, all pages or custom path. Once you are done with set up, click on save action. Your Action Recorder is all set to track items added to cart on your website.
- E-commerce tracking — Checkout made
Firstly, go to product’s checkout page, choose action name as “checkout made” and action type as on click. Select checkout by clicking on the pointing symbol. Next step is to choose your attributes. For the following example, I chose product name and product price to be displayed as the attributes when checkout button is clicked. The final step is to step up tracking between current page, all pages or custom path. Once you are done with set up, click on save action. Your Action Recorder is all set to track product checkouts on your website.
Step 2: Mixpanel integration (send event data to Mixpanel)
Integrating Mixpanel with Action Recorder is hassle-free, you just need to add your Mixpanel ID in Action Recorder to connect with your account. To set up action workflow, choose events that matter most for your company. Here, our objective is to track cart abandonment events, for that you need to setup workflow for add to cart and checkout made actions. Create a trigger path if needed or leave it as default.
Mixpanel integration with action Recorder is now complete. Open a new tab and click on events which you set up for tracking. You will find your events right in your Mixpanel account.
Benefits of using Mixpanel with Action Recorder
Below we would like to show you how the data sent from Action Recorder to Mixpanel is going to help you to get maximum benefits out of it. The information in Mixpanel can be sorted out into four important categories 1) Activity Analysis 2) Lifecycle Analysis 3) Users 4) Take Action
1. Activity analysis :
- Gain user insights of events which you sent from Action Recorder to Mixpanel ( In this case it is added to cart and check out made ) get results displayed in the way you like, choose between the bar chart, pie chart, line graph.
- With Mixpanel segmentation feature get a clear picture of the users’ action on your website and split them based on location, referring domain, Browser/mobile versions and much more. In live view, filter your events by the properties that matter most for your business.
- Mixpanel formulas help you in performing arithmetic function between any two events such as add to cart and checkout along with its chosen properties. This helps you create and comparison chart between events.
2. Lifecycle Analysis :
- Creating a Mixpanel funnel for cart abandonment event helps you to sort out people added to cart and didn’t complete the checkout process. Get the full picture overview of abandoned cart funnel with conversion rates for following events.
- With Mixpanel retention feature, track users who have left your website after completing an action and returned back to your website on performing their second action in a given date range. Choose between first time, recurring and addiction users based on the events and its parameters.
3. Users :
- With User analytics feature in Mixpanel, explore and get to know about your every user. Choosing properties helps you to display in a particular set. On choosing any particular user the entire events history like actions made by the user gets associated with its properties.
- Using Mixpanel predict analyse the present performance of key metrics of your product. By defining conversion goals (eg: cart abandonment) you can set a number of times events have to be performed. Using machine learning it gives predictive analytics based on the events which you choose.
4. Take Action :
- Mixpanel allows you to set up campaigns for any two events on your website. For setting up cart abandonment campaigns, two important events that you need are the products added to cart and products completed the checkout. This data helps in sending targeted messages to the people abandoned the cart.
- Using Mixpanel messages you can re-engage with users visited your site or performed some action like add to cart but didn’t complete your goal (eg: checkout made). Sending push notifications right into their mobile devices helps you to keep engage and stay in touch with them.
- Mixpanel A/B testing is a great way to perform experiments between two different versions of a page or the product. By analysing results, you can understand which one outperforms other.
I would like to wrap up this article by saying, with proper use of event tracking tool such as Action Recorder you can track and send important events to product analytics tool like Mixpanel. Which helps you to measure and analyse event data and to get maximum benefits from all your analytics efforts of your product.
We would love to hear your feedback.
Learn to set up E-commerce event tracking for your entire E-commerce store using Action Recorder.
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Originally published at www.customerlabs.co on November 17, 2017.
