Web vs Marketing vs Product Analytics.

I think (hope maybe) the ecosystem has evolved passed the question of whether analytics is needed. The focus now is on the direction. Now we know it's important, the question now is what's next.

We know of analytics in its general sense but not really the types of analytics available and how we can leverage them for growth.

This article will focus on the basics of the web, marketing and product analytics. I have also written intensive articles on each and currently writing a playbook on how to get started with product analytics. Send a dm if you want to get early access.

So let's get to it then.

Web analytics and marketing analytics are related, but they have different focuses.

Web analytics

Web analytics focuses on analyzing data from a website to understand how users interact with it, including things like the number of visitors, where they come from, what pages they visit, and how long they stay. You can use tools like Google analytics, Google search console, Hotjar etc to get this basic report. Once your website is live, it's important to have those trackers in place so you can start tracking traffic to your website and your marketing efforts from the get-go.

Tracking is not the end but a means to an end

The idea of setting it (implementing) and forgetting should not be. The goal of web analytics is to improve the user experience and increase conversions. A good analysis of your website can tell you if you have a gap in your conversion funnel that can be optimized to give you a 2-4x conversion increase . It can also give you insight into customer persona that you initially did not think of and basically so much more. A good benchmark is to spend 20-30% of your analytical time implementing (e.g events, goal(s) tracking) and 70-80% analysing the data.

Marketing Analytics

Marketing analytics, on the other hand, focuses on analyzing data from marketing campaigns to understand their effectiveness. This can include things like the response rate to email campaigns, the conversion rate of pay-per-click ads, and the ROI of social media advertising. The goal of marketing analytics is to optimize marketing efforts and allocate resources more effectively.

UTM Tracking

“UTM” stands for “Urchin tracking module.” UTM tags can be added to the end of regular URLs, in order to give any analytics platform information about that link. A UTM tag always contains Source, Medium, and Campaign Name parameters. Relying on Google Analytics to identify the source can be seen as taking a gamble, especially when running campaigns.

You want to effectively identify which marketing source, channel or campaign is bringing in the most conversion, so you can align your activities with the best-performing marketing campaign/channel.

Example of a URL with UTM code

https://examplewebsite.com/testcampaign?utm_campaign=test1&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

The Campaign, medium and source are identifiers you can use to tag a particular URL.

Product analytics

Product analytics is focused on understanding how users interact and engage with a product, using data from the product itself, this can include things like feature usage, user flows, and user feedback. The goal of Product analytics is to understand customer needs and improve the product accordingly. As I mentioned earlier I am working on a full product analytics playbook, if you want to understand how to set up product analytics and carry out analyses on the data then you reach out to get early access to the playbook.

Final Points

• Don't start any marketing campaign without having the right analytics to track the success of the campaign.
• Don't set it and forget it. You need value from the Data, that's why you did the work.
• Try not to undermine the implementation/setup stage for the analytics, if done wrong it can totally derail the whole team by giving false data.
• Ask questions to avoid errors
• Don't be lost in the data. It can be easy to become overwhelmed by the amount of data available and to lose sight of the important information. One way to avoid this is to have a clear understanding of the problem you are trying to solve and to focus on the data that is relevant to that problem.

I know I kept it basic but I still hope you got value from the article. Please share and let me know what you think in the comment.

To your digital success.????

FYI I am organising a "Ask a growth Expert" session where we bring in experts to answer founders' marketing, growth and analytical question. If you have a pressing question you can join the webinar and ask, and of course, learn from other questions. Register here