An enterprise digital leader recently lamented, “We have every type of digital analytics for every different team. But no actionable analytics for everyone.”

So after 30+ years of web and digital analytics, how did we get here? 

If you’ve worked as a digital leader in a big company over the last 10+ years, you’ve likely witnessed rapid expansion of digital across the org, where every different team (product, tech, UX CX, VOC, etc) needed to be data-driven, but they all had unique business and technical needs. 

As demand for digital data multiplied, pretty soon, we had multiple categories:

• Web analytics
• Native app analytics
• Experience analytics
• Product analytics
• Journey analytics
• Voice of customer
• Real user monitoring
• Performance monitoring

These tools placated every siloed team with a spot solution for their specific function, but they created unnecessary complexity and failed to help teams across the organization with what was truly needed – a holistic and shared view of the digital customer experience. 

A brief history of how overlapping analytics categories evolved.

It all started with web analytics – okay, if you go way back, you might even think of those little hit counters at the bottom of the web page.

As web analytics tools advanced, they measured marketing campaigns, popular pages, and drop-off points using on-premise software with daily log file processing. With the rise of SaaS and cloud-based tools, the demand for capturing detailed behavioral data increased, leading to the development of experience analytics (heatmaps and session replays) and journey analytics (tracking the end-to-end customer journey across online and offline sources). Then the iPhone was introduced, and a new category called product analytics emerged to track app usage and retention in separate silos.

This resulted in a landscape with distinct web analytics tools, product analytics tools, experience analytics tools, and journey analytics tools, each focusing on different aspects of the user experience.

Inevitably, they all started bolting on similar capabilities as their competition and they all started sounding similar. And yet every team had what they needed… right? Not entirely. There were too many tags, and page performance was declining. The data and use cases were overlapping. And after investing millions trying to stitch together fragmented clickstream data across devices and channels, companies realized the data wasn’t actionable.

The future of analytics is convergence.

There’s a seismic shift underway. Businesses are demanding consolidation in the digital analytics industry. 

Here are just a few reasons enterprises are embracing the shift: 

• Not wanting to add another tag on the site (the impact on performance)
• Too much of the same data being collected across multiple tools
• Maintaining integrations between multiple tools
• Lots of data not being acted on
• Too many teams in the dark about what’s available and how to access it
• Budget holders scrutinizing tech expenses vs. adoption/business impact
• Uncertainty about how AI impacts all of this

Bottom line? Companies are tired of wasting time on fragmented tools and data sets, and the unrealized ROI of too much analytics.

Welcome to the new definition of digital analytics.

You don’t have to google “what is digital analytics” to know there are a bunch of definitions, almost entirely focused on the collection, management and analysis of digital data. 

So how does Quantum Metric define digital analytics? 

Digital analytics proactively monitors, diagnoses, and optimizes digital journeys for every team. It empowers businesses with a clear, quantifiable vision for the digital customer experience.

The goal of digital analytics is to empower fast and decisive action across teams to enhance digital product, design, technical and marketing strategies, ultimately boosting customer satisfaction, loyalty, cost savings and revenue.

How we define it differently.

Instead of the heavy focus on manually capturing and configuring data, numbers, charts and graphs, our vision of digital analytics is around empowering clarity, speed, and action. It’s about enabling every team across the org with better business outcomes. And most importantly, it’s about customers.

Understanding customer needs has never been more important. And yet listening to customers has never been more difficult. They aren’t filling out the surveys and providing feedback like they used to, physical interactions have shifted to digital, and it’s no longer one bank teller to one customer interaction at a time—it’s one product owner to millions. 

In our vision of digital analytics, data is captured automatically from websites, native mobile apps, kiosks and other sources, helping teams instantly visualize and understand the digital experience and quantify its impact on business KPIs. And it’s about bringing session-based and user-based (omnichannel) analysis together in one place, with web analytics, product analytics, experience analytics, and journey analytics merging together. 

The 3 foundations of digital analytics (and the teams they support).

High level definitions have little meaning until we understand the actual, specific use cases that drive solution value and customer impact.

Quantum Metric has identified 3 foundations of digital analytics, with a single prevalent factor across all of them:

• Quantification of user behavior is the prevalent use case – meaning the ability to size the impact of any interaction on business KPIs
  • Monitor every aspect of the digital customer journey, from business KPIs to customer friction
  • Diagnose what’s happening when things deviate from the baseline
  • Optimize experiences with data-driven insights on customer behaviors and new releases/experiments

And any team across the org are empowered to leverage any of these use cases. For example:

• IT teams can monitor and diagnose uptime, technical errors and site speed across applications and releases, and then optimize these metrics accordingly. And they can quantify the impact of this friction on business KPIs and identify opportunities for improvement.
• Business and product teams can monitor and diagnose metrics such as conversion, revenue, engagement, adoption and retention across key digital components, such as funnels, pages, journeys, features and A/B tests, and then optimize these components accordingly. And they can quantify the impact of this friction on business KPIs and identify opportunities for improvement.
• Marketing teams can monitor and diagnose friction on campaigns, landing pages and promotions, and optimize these functions accordingly. And they can quantify the impact of this friction on business KPIs and identify opportunities for improvement.

The convergence of analytics goes beyond the need to provide digital listening and visibility at scale—it’s about aligning around the customer’s needs across teams. Empowering organizations to focus on the hearts of their customers.

Conclusion

At Quantum Metric, we are reshaping digital analytics. This means web analytics, product analytics, experience analytics and journey analytics will never look the same again.

When we see the future of digital analytics:

• We don’t see web, product, journey and experience analytics as separate tools.
• We don’t see business and tech teams hoarding data in silos.
• We don’t just see data, numbers, charts and graphs.
• We don’t see complexity and make you ask “what’s the data mean?” 

When we see the future of digital analytics:

• We see simplicity.
• We see clarity and fast action. 
• We see collaboration.
• We see business results: increased satisfaction, cost savings, and revenue for your company.

And most importantly, when we see the future of digital analytics, we see the customer.

Welcome to the new digital analytics.