Product Analytics Software

What is Product Analytics Software?

Product analytics software is used to measure and report how people interact with web and software applications, or other products. Use cases include product training and onboarding, customer feedback collection, and learning to understand customer retention and churn to guide product development.

Product analytics software’s monitoring capabilities are greater than heatmap and session recording tools. While they can collect clicks and views and generate reports from these, leading product tools also capture customer sentiment and produce more detailed customer journey information, as well as customer and behavioral segmentation.

Product Analytics Software Features & Capabilities

The following features are common in product analytics software. Many are distinct to this category of software, while some features overlap with related categories such as digital adoption or BI tools.

• Automated user interaction data capture

• Analyze data in real-time, or using historical data

• Individual or group user activity timeline

• Behavior based user segmentation

• User data based segmentation (e.g. job title, device, geography)

• Analytics linking customer behavior to KPIs

• Analytics linking customer behavior to churn

• Attribution, linking customer source to behavior & retention

• Non-linear customer journey analytics

• Touchpoint analytics (i.e. learn how touchpoints influence customer outcomes)

• Product engagement scoring (alternately customer engagement scoring)

• Data history retention

• Data export, or data warehouse integration

• Retention and churn reporting, churn rate calculation

• Graphical layout of product plan or roadmap

• Codeless interaction with data and analytics

• Data labeling, virtual events (i.e. perform analytics with virtual data, safely)

• Customer feedback collection

• Customer guidance, similar to that seen in digital adoption tools

Types of Product Analytics Software

Product Analytics tools can be obtained through vendors providing Customer Success and Customer Experience (CX) platforms and suites, like Gainsight or UserIQ, or that provide analytics along with interactive customer guidance and feedback collection (Pendo). For product teams and developers that want a strictly analytic package, there are focused solution (e.g. Heap, Amplitude). Finally, for products in the development phase or for low traffic applications, many leading vendors offer free forever plans (Heap, Woopra, Amplitude), that may also include customer support.