From the course: Data-Driven Product Management

The importance of product analytics

From the course: Data-Driven Product Management

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The importance of product analytics

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- [Presenter] One of the most important aspects of being a good product manager is understanding your users, what they do, and what drives them to do these behaviors. Product analytics gives us the ability, to not only capture, but also analyze our users and see how they're interacting with our applications. Many users who are new to product management often ask, "Why don't we just use Google Analytics?" Google Analytics does capture user and behavior data, but the focus is really on marketing and advertising and while you can certainly eke out some valuable information, ultimately marketing analytics platforms are designed to convert users and understand users from a purely financial and marketing perspective. Product analytics, on the other hand, focus on the entirety of how users are engaging with your application. They're designed to understand the entire customer journey as well as what is and isn't working within your application. Product analytics tools are also private, meaning that all the data you capture and analyze is only accessible internally to your organization. Product analytics empower product managers and other users within the organization to do so many things. We can identify which users are really engaging with your applications. We can find problem areas. We can understand what hooks are improving retention or growth. We can use them to support decision making. We can understand our users from web to mobile and across the entire enterprise's digital presence. And this is really just the tip of the iceberg, by understanding user data and behavior, all sorts of questions can be answered. Keep in mind that while this course is focused on product managers, it's very common for this data to be shared and utilized across the business. Information can be relevant to sales and marketing, customer service, and all kinds of managers to support decision making and analysis. As with other types of data, what you're observing and how becomes a critical area of how well your products and your company can do. Ultimately, product analytics gives product managers control over their product by helping them to understand who their users are, how they're using the product, as well as set and track goals, and grow their applications, reduce churn, and increase retention of their users.

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