Product Analytics vs Marketing Analytics
Product analytics is often confused with marketing analytics. Although the only common thing between those two, is that they both contain the word analytics. In this article, I will explain the differences between the two. Let’s start with a brief overview of two and then the comparisons.
Product Analytics
Product analytics helps you to understand your user behaviours and patterns with tools such as funnel, retention and segmentation. To get the best use of product analytics you need to have a mobile or web application. With digital footprints available, it is easier to track user events and actions. Product analytics solely focuses on your product and that’s it. The goal is to provide insights to your decision makers and give them the big picture on the product. With product analytics, you see whether your newly acquired customers will stay long term or you can segment your best customers to identify their common characteristics and habits.
Marketing Analytics
Marketing analytics allow marketers to measure the success of their marketing activities. You collect data from all marketing channels and compile it to a single platform to give a holistic view over the company’s marketing activities and their efficiency. Using the snapshot gathered by the analysis, marketers see the opportunities to improve their marketing activities. Without marketing analytics it’s nearly impossible to determine the ROI which is a key metric for the marketers.
Differences Between Product and Marketing Analytics
Many people think that product analytics is just a fancy way of calling marketing analytics. Let’s shed some light on the main differences.
1) Product Analytics Collects Data from Different Sources
Marketing analytics collects data from various marketing channels hence the data is purely related to marketing activities. Product analytics on the other hand collect data related to your product, it collects customer event data. In other words, product analytics is fed with user level data.
Product Analytics is more complex than marketing analytics. For example creating a funnel in marketing analytics is easier and more straightforward, because events that creates the steps of the funnel are limited compared to doing the same in product analytics. Reason for this is because there are so many user events that you can track on your app and each industry has a unique structure that collects different user events. Users in Uber behave differently than users in Just Eat, therefore you need to use different user events, so you can map your product goals accurately and then conduct your analysis on chosen metrics which are unique to your business. As new industries emerge, more unique user events will be available to collect.
2) Product Analytics Focuses on Different Phases of Customer Funnel
In marketing analytics, the focus is more on the earlier stages like conversion and acquisition of customers. So the metrics are focused on the stages before your target reach becomes customers. Whereas in product analytics, customer event data is the core data, the name “customer” indicates that product analytics focuses on the later stages because it collects data about your customers. Let me put it this way, a company that has an online app wants to track how many prospects/potential customers have been reached with their latest marketing activities, and how many have downloaded the app ,and were converted to a customer. This is pure marketing analytics. If company wants to see what percentage of their newly acquired customers will come back and use the app. The next thing to do is to use retention to get that information, and this is product analytics. To simplify, Marketing Analytics focus on the earlier stages of customer journey, while Product Analytics focus on the later stages of the journey.
3) Product Analytics Contains Confidential Information While Marketing Analytics Operates On Public Data
We know that the data collected in marketing analytics is marketing related and data collected in product analytics is related to user behaviours. Because of this, confidentially of the data collected differs as well. Data collected in marketing analytics is publicly available information and does not violate the privacy. This is not the same case in product analytics, here you need to collect some confidential data.For example, information such as name, surname, address, email and telephone number are considered to be confidential and sensitive information. You need to send your data to third- party in order to analyze your customer behaviour. Some industries are more flexible in terms of security but some industries like ride-share, healthcare and insurance are very sensitive about sharing their data with third-party ( In Rakam we have a solution for that, you can keep your data in your own database and use Rakam to get deep insight on your users).
Conclusion
I hope that this article has provided you with the information to separate product analytics from marketing analytics. If you want to analyse your marketing activities then we recommend using tools such as Google Analytics, Heap Analytics or Oribi. If you want to get insight on your customers, using product analytics tools such as Rakam is a must. If you wish to use both on a single platform and avoid the pain of juggling between multiple platforms, we recommend you to use Growth Analytics platform such as Rakam. You can do marketing and product analytics in our platform. We are also known as “FullStack Analytics” platform. We allow you to to combine your both marketing and product data with our very easy to use non technical background friendly UI. I talked about the complexity of the product analytics but we allow you to get deeper insight your users in a seamless way.
Feel free to check out our Growth Analytics tool from here.
