Marketing Analytics vs. Product Analytics

1. How marketing analytics differs from product analytics
2. Why the marketing department should work more closely with product development
3. These software solutions help you with marketing and product analytics
4. Use cases using the example of Amplitude
5. Background knowledge: What is Marketing Analytics?
6. Conclusion

Often the marketing department and product development work separately. The tasks are different, as are the data. While marketing departments strive to attract new customers with marketing campaigns, product management works on product development independently. But is this a good approach?

We say, no. How marketing analytics and product analytics differ and how to use both together to offer your customers a holistic digital experience, you will find out in this article.

How marketing analytics differs from product analytics

To understand the difference between marketing analytics and product analytics, let's look at both analytics fields individually.

With marketing analytics, marketing managers measure the success of their marketing activities. Data from all marketing channels are collected centrally in one tool. This allows, for example, to find out which channels best reach the target group and which advertising messages are most effective. Individual marketing campaigns can also be evaluated to optimize them continuously. The focus of marketing analytics is on customer acquisition.

Product analytics helps product managers understand how customers interact with digital products and content. The focus of product analytics is to improve the digital product based on real user data. Product features are evaluated and adapted based on behavioral data. This improves the user experience of the product, leading to a high customer lifetime value.

In short:

Data from marketing analysis helps create successful marketing campaigns to win customers. Product analytics provide unique insights into product usage and user experience. These findings are used to optimize the product.

Why the marketing department should work more closely with product development

Looking at the focus topics, it becomes clear quickly: The combination of marketing analytics and product analytics is a terrific idea. Marketing analytics focuses on the early stages of the customer journey, product analytics on the later stages. By using the results from both analyses, the customer journey can be viewed and optimized holistically.

Marketing analysis tools, such as Google Analytics, are capable of recording and analyzing certain metrics, such as the number of users, bounce rates, average session duration, sessions by channel, page views or goal completion. But not much more. With product analytics, you gain insight into the "why". For example, if many people download a particular app following a marketing campaign, open it only once and maybe even uninstall it right after, the question arises as to why this is the case. Product analytics track these steps and show where the problem or problems lie. Are there difficulties with registration? Is the navigation unclear? All this and more is shown to you by product analysis.

With product analytics, you also see which features are used most frequently. This is important not only for product development but also to show the preferences and needs of users. With product analytics, you can find out who your best customers are. You can incorporate this information into your marketing to reach your target audience even more specifically.

If marketing and product teams use a common analysis platform, they can depict the entire customer journey. They have insight into where the customer journey begins, the interaction breaks off, conversions take place. This allows - together - to identify important turning points and create new content or integrate more support.

Marketing analytics ensures that prospects become customers. Product analytics ensures that customers happily stay and become loyal fans.

We will look at a few use cases for the interaction of both analytics fields later.

These software solutions help you with marketing and product analytics

Data is only useful if they are evaluated. On OMR Reviews, you will find great tools for both analytics fields. Since the selection is large, start with these:

Tools for Marketing Analytics:

Google Analytics

Adobe Analytics

Matomo (zuvor Piwik)

It's best to take a look at this article on marketing analytics tools to get a more detailed insight into some tools.

Tools for Product Analytics:

Amplitude

Heap

mixpanel

Some analysis tools, such as Amplitude, help to unite both analytics fields. Let's take a closer look at this using three use cases.

Use cases using the example of Amplitude

1. Campaign Reporting

With campaign reporting tools, you can see through which channels users are won from organic and paid sources. This allows you to understand how your marketing activities impact your product KPIs. You can import impressions, clicks, and costs of advertising campaigns and get a cross-channel overview of the efficiency of your campaigns. Behavioral data and campaign data are combined. This leads to better decisions when it comes to marketing investments.

2. Acquisition Channel Reporting

Every marketing team must be able to allocate its expenditures to individual sales channels. With Amplitude's Acquisition Channels, you can easily separate organic and paid channels. You can also see which activities users have carried out in which channel. This way, you find out through which sales channels you win customers.

It is also interesting for product teams to track whether usage changes depending on the distribution channel. If visitors from paid and organic sources follow different click paths, for example, both teams should analyze together why the paths are different and how they can be optimized.

3. Attribution Reporting

Attribution reporting gives you holistic insights into the history of each individual customer interaction. So product teams can see, for example, which product features are used when. The marketing team can use this information to optimize the onboarding process of new customers.

In longer conversion cycles with multiple user sessions, you can compare the same metric with multiple attribution models. This way, you find out, for example, which advertising campaigns trigger the first interaction (awareness), the last (high intent) or one in between (research) among users.

Background knowledge: What is Marketing Analytics?

Marketing analytics is a process to track and analyze customer behavior. The analysis provides insights into the effectiveness of your marketing measures.

There are three types of data to collect information about customers:

1. First Party: First Party data are information that you collect directly from visitors and customers. The sources here are different: page views and dwell time on your website from web analytics tools, opening rates of newsletters from your newsletter tool, etc. In short: all data that you collect via your own software and systems. You own this data.

2. Second Party: Second Party data are actually First Party data, but you did not collect them. These data can come from your business partners with whom you plan and carry out joint actions.

3. Third Party: Third Party data are collected by third-party providers with whom you do not necessarily work together. Examples are queries to search engines, data from market research or data from Facebook in the ad manager about your target group.

As you can see, with marketing analytics, a lot of data from different sources come together. It is a challenge to manage these quantities of data and derive the right measures from them. This task is simplified by marketing analytics tools. Data can be easily sorted and visually prepared. Your task is to set marketing goals, derive metrics from them, segment your target audience and collect the corresponding data. From the findings of the marketing analysis, you should be able to derive activities that contribute to your business goals.

You can see exactly how to implement marketing analytics with the presented software Amplitude in this video:

Conclusion

Product analytics and marketing analytics collect different data and address different stages of the customer journey. Good marketing is important to attract customers. But if the product is not convincing, you lose the customers again. As you can see from the examples and use cases, it makes sense to use a product analytics tool like Amplitude that can also import and use your marketing data. Only by working together, marketing and product teams can create an all-around attractive customer experience.