The Misaligned Expectations of Product Analytics
Product Analytics helps you understand user journeys in your product to optimize growth metrics. Given how critical this is for product-led companies, one would think product analytics would be widely used within companies, by every team – Product, Growth, Marketing, Support and Customer Success.
But the reality is that product analytics has very low adoption. One third of companies do very little or no product analytics. A large number of companies have been disillusioned with product analytics not delivering the ROI it promised. This is reflected directly in the growth (or lack thereof) of market-leading vendors in the space.
So why is this the case?
High TCO Begets Low ROI
The key issue is that traditional product analytics solutions, by virtue of their architecture and pricing model, have an absurdly expensive total cost of ownership that does not justify the ROI they bring. Contributing to the high TCO are:
- Event-based and MTU-based pricing that does not scale with customer value
- Event management simply to control the costs of the above
- Fragmented analytics platforms involving multiple teams due to limitations of product analytics (e.g. rigid data model and reports) and BI tools (SQL required and no time series analysis)
- ETL / Reverse ETL between multiple analytics platforms
- Reconciling inconsistencies between those data silos and fragmented analytics platforms
All of the above have made product analytics very expensive for enterprises, particularly as they scale. But complicating the investment in product analytics is that it resides in its own silo, limiting the impact of insights it can provide when only tracking in-product channels. This has led to the majority of product analytics being done outside of product analytics tools where the majority of customer data already resides.
The solution is a broader customer analytics solution that is more cost-effective.
Breaking Down Silos for Business-Impactful Customer Analytics
First-generation product analytic tools are vertical-integrated silos. The market-leading products only work with product instrumentation data that goes into their proprietary SaaS “black hole”. As a result, they can only provide the first level of basic analytics. They are blind to all the other channels of data that have a huge bearing on the overall experience of their users. This includes data from sales, subscription, support, store, inventory, content, etc.
The solution to this problem is for customers to graduate from siloed product analytics to more business-impactful customer analytics. This involves combining and seamlessly analyzing across product instrumentation data and all other customer business data. NetSpring provides advanced product and customer analytics working directly on your data warehouse – the secure, governed repository of all data in your enterprise.
NetSpring Growth Plan
Today we are happy to announce our Growth Plan that enables you to easily do rich, business-impactful product and customer analytics, for a low cost. Our seat-based license with no minimums, lets you get started easily and scale predictably as analytics needs grow in your organization. Starting at $49/month/seat, you can put this in the hands of everyone in the organization that has to deal with any aspect of the experience you provide your customers.
Accelerate the growth of your business with NetSpring. Sign up here today!
