A Comprehensive Guide to Digital Analytics in SaaS: Definition, Examples & Tools

A Comprehensive Guide to Digital Analytics in SaaS: Definition, Examples & Tools

What’s digital analytics? How can it help product and marketing teams make data-driven decisions and improve the user experience at different stages of the customer journey?

If you’re after answers to these questions, we’ve got you covered!

In this article, we also look at different kinds of digital analytics data, how to implement a digital analytics strategy and the best tools to help you do it!

Are you in?

TL;DR

  • Digital analytics empowers businesses by decoding user behavior and optimizing online presence.
  • Making data-driven decisions is crucial in today’s digital landscape, facilitated by digital analytics. It fosters accountability, and continuous improvement, and guides innovation.
  • Digital analytics uncovers user pain points and identifies friction in the customer journey.
  • Tracking various digital analytics data sources offers insights into web analytics, product data, customer data, and digital marketing data.
  • Crafting a digital analytics strategy involves defining objectives, selecting KPIs, choosing tools, defining data sources, collecting data, analyzing insights, and creating strategies.
  • Tools like Userpilot, LogRocket, and Google Analytics offer diverse features for comprehensive digital analytics.
  • Leveraging digital analytics tools empowers teams to make data-driven decisions, shape strategies, and drive business success in the digital realm.
  • Want to get started with product and customer analytics? Get a free Userpilot demo today, and we’ll show you how!

Try Userpilot and Get Started with Digital Analytics

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.
Track product usage data with dashboards

Track product usage data with dashboards

Customer data

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

Use customer profiles to collect customer data in one place

Use customer profiles to collect customer data in one place

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

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.

Example of a goal-setting framework

Example of a goal-setting framework

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.

Collect quantitative feature engagement data with Userpilot's dashboards

Collect quantitative feature engagement data with Userpilot’s dashboards

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

Create surveys code-free with Userpilot

Create surveys code-free with Userpilot

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.

Perform path analysis with ease in Userpilot

Perform path analysis with ease in Userpilot

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.
Userpilot feature tagging

Userpilot feature tagging.

  • 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.
Funnel analysis

Funnel analysis in Userpilot.

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

Path analysis in Userpilot.

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

Trend analysis in Userpilot.

Retention analysis

Retention analysis in Userpilot.

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

Product usage dashboard.

Flow analytics

Flow analytics in Userpilot.

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

Userpilot intergrations.

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 offers 3 pricing tiers:

  • Starter – from $249/month
  • Growth – from $499/month
  • Enterprise – custom pricing

Userpilot pricing

Take Your Product Analytics to the Next Level with Userpilot

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.
Product analytics tools: LogRocket

Product analytics tools: LogRocket.

LogRocket pricing

LogRocket offers 4 plans:

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

LogRocket 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).

Product analytics tools: Google Analytics

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!

Try Userpilot for Product Analytics

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