Web, product, and digital experience analytics are converging—here’s how.
Jun 16, 2022
Summary:
- Gartner’s updated Market Guide highlights three converging categories: web analytics, product analytics, and digital experience analytics, all focused on improving digital customer experiences.
- Web analytics measure behavior across sites and apps, product analytics focus on how users engage with products, and digital experience analytics provide diagnostic insight using capabilities like session replay, heat maps, and machine learning.
- Gartner notes growing overlap between product and experience analytics, broader stakeholder value across the business, and stronger machine learning and integration capabilities in modern tools.
- Quantum Metric is recognized by Gartner as both a product analytics and digital experience analytics solution, helping teams identify friction, understand customer behavior, and align around real-time insights.
- The platform complements existing stacks by working alongside web analytics, performance analytics, and voice of customer tools, helping organizations identify and close gaps in their digital analytics strategy.
It’s hard to believe, but the era of clicks and page views is 30 years old. With more dynamic web and mobile experiences and complex customer interactions, digital leaders have an onslaught of new tools to help them understand customer and user behaviors, identify friction points, and proactively improve their digital experiences.
Take-aways from Gartner’s research on web, product, and digital experience analytics.
Some good news: To help with that, Gartner has published an update to its Market Guide for Web, Product and Digital Experience Analytics (subscription required).
Now the bad news: These categories aren’t discrete and increasingly converging, so it’s still up to buyers to take stock of their current stack, identify the analytics and workflow gaps, and prioritize vendor strengths according to their own business needs.
Here are the following three categories defined in this Gartner research.
What are web analytics?
Web analytics tools — Specialized analytics tools used to understand and improve the digital CX, attract and retain users, and analyze operations and actions taken across responsive websites and mobile apps.
What are product analytics?
Product analytics tools — Tools and processes used to understand the behavior of users across products or services to inform decisions about how to improve the product experience and increase product engagement.
What are digital experience analytics?
Digital experience analytics tools — Tools that provide diagnostic insights into visitor activity and the CX on responsive web and mobile apps, enabled by advanced analytics and machine learning, session replay and heat map technology.
How is the digital analytics landscape evolving?
In the past two years since the report was first published, Gartner has identified a few notable trends we cite here (read the full report for additional trends):
- There’s growing overlap between product analytics and experience analytics. (Quantum was recognized in both categories in 2020. Now more vendors have gained this distinction.)
- While web, product, and digital experience analytics had traditionally served separate stakeholders, this convergence means that multiple stakeholders across the business can derive business value from each.
- Advancements in machine learning help digital teams detect customer friction and rank issues by financial impact.
- Integration capabilities are keeping pace (example: take a look at our recent ServiceNow embedded replay integration).
How are web analytics, product analytics, and experience analytics similar?
This helpful visual from Gartner shows how these three categories and adjacent categories overlap.
How Quantum Metric fits into the digital analytics strategy.
We’re pleased to be recognized by Gartner as both a product analytics and digital experience analytics solution. Bringing together analytics for teams like product, UX, marketing, but also IT, CX, and customer service is core to a Continuous Product Design approach.
At Quantum Metric, enterprise customers use our platform to:
- Proactively discover and quantify friction, whether it’s a UX/design issue or a technical error.
- Gain deeper empathy of customer needs. View customer sessions and instantly build segments off 300+ behavioral, technical, and business data we capture out of the box.
- Increase alignment across business and technical teams with a shared and real-time view of what’s working, what’s not, and what to prioritize.
Where Quantum Metric integrates into existing digital analytics stack:
- Web analytics for the marketing campaign performance and attribution metrics
- Performance analytics to connect customer friction to application or performance issues
- Voice of customer to visualize, quantify, and prioritize the customer feedback
Do you know what gaps you have in your digital analytics stack?
We’re proud that we’re the only solution recognized by Gartner in its product analytics, digital experience analytics, and digital experience monitoring categories.
To learn how Quantum Metric fits into your current digital analytics stack, watch this product tour or contact us for a tailored demo.