If you want to offer the best possible product and customer experience, then you need to monitor the right product experience analytics. Without this, you won’t be able to make informed decisions on how to improve your product or what customers want from your product.
For most industries, the average customer retention rate is below 20%. This shocking statistic shows just how easy it is to lose customers if you don’t offer them the kind of experience they’re after.
Improving your product experience is also essential if you’re going to increase product sales and stay ahead of your competitors.
To help you get this right, the following guide breaks down everything you need to know about product experience analytics and what to track.
What is Product Experience?
Product experience refers to the entire journey a customer has with your business’s product. This means the product experience encapsulates everything from the moment a potential customer discovers your product, right through the sales process, product adoption, and retention phases.
The product experience refers to every touchpoint a customer has with your business that shapes their product experience.
This is more extensive than the user experience, which refers to how people use your products. Product experience covers more than just the functional aspects of your product. Instead, it’s the entire experience a customer has when using the product and this affects their life.
What is Product Experience Analytics?
Product experience analytics refers to the data you gather to understand your customers’ product experiences.
This can help you understand which pages or elements of your product are performing well, which elements are not being fully utilized by your customers, and more.
When you create a new product, it’s always a good idea to establish important product metrics and KPIs to monitor. Your product experience analytics covers these metrics, to help you evaluate how successfully your product is being used.
Monitoring product experience analytics can help you consistently improve your product offering. This is important for enhancing customer experiences, boosting customer retention, and improving word-of-mouth referrals for your products.
Product Experience Analytics vs. Product Experience Insights
People often get confused between product experience analytics and product experience insights. While they’re very similar terms, they each focus on slightly different things.
While product experience analytics are based on gathering hard data, product experience insights are all about understanding this data and customer intentions. Focusing on product experience insights helps you connect the dots from your analytics to gain a complete picture of your customer’s behavior and product usage. This can help you enhance customer experiences more effectively.
It’s important to use both product experience analytics and insights together to help you optimize your overall product strategy.
Why Product Experience Analytics is Important?
If you want to improve your overall business success, monitoring product experience analytics is essential.
Let’s break down some of the main reasons why this is the case.
Improves Decision Making
Product experience analytics helps teams make more informed decisions about their products and businesses. By looking at product data, you get a better understanding of customer behaviors, product demand, and sales trends.
This can help you make smarter decisions to drive business growth more efficiently.
Improves the Customer Experience
By looking at your product experience analytics, you can refine the customer journey and personalize your customer experiences. This helps improve the customer experience and develops longer-lasting relationships with your customers.
Looking at product experience analytics helps you understand things like customer preferences, user behavior, and customer needs. This knowledge is essential for refining your marketing, sales, and customer success efforts.
Improves Process Efficiency
Analyzing product experience analytics helps businesses maximize efficiency across the product lifecycle. By looking at usage patterns or customer behaviors, businesses can improve and streamline their operations. This results in saved time and effort, while also boosting profitability.
Improves Market Analysis
Using product experience analytics helps you understand the market a lot better. This is important for gaining an edge over the competition.
You can use product experience analytics to assess how your product is performing, how users are engaging with it, and what kind of expectations they have around your product. It’s useful to compare this with your competition to help improve your market competitiveness and ensure you’re meeting your target audience’s expectations and demands.
What Product Experience Analytics You Should Track?
Monitoring the right product experience analytics can help any business gain valuable insights to improve its overall product and business performance.
While the specific metrics you track may differ based on your product and goals, here are some of the most important product experience analytics to monitor.
User Engagement
User engagement is one of the most important metrics to track. This is all about measuring how users are interacting with your product and how engaged they are with it.
To monitor user engagement, you can track metrics like session duration, the number of sessions per user, and usage based on specific product features. Monitoring these metrics helps you understand how frequently people use your product, and how deeply they’re engaging with each feature.
This will help you improve specific features and understand which areas of your product are most in-demand.
Performance Metrics
Product experience analytics need to include a range of important performance metrics. These metrics are used to understand how the different technical elements of your product are working.
While performance metrics help guide your technical, and product decisions, they also mirror the customer experience. By offering excellent technical performance, your product is sure to provide a great user experience too.
Some of the most important product performance metrics to track include page load times, response times, as well as the overall stability of your systems. If you identify any slow or unreliable performance in your product, make sure you address this as soon as possible.
User Retention
Retention refers to the rate at which your customers continue to use and engage with your product over time. The greater your user retention is, the better, as this shows that users are getting long-term value from your product.
Monitoring user retention helps you understand if your product is meeting users’ needs and helping them achieve their goals. You can also monitor the average time when users drop off from using your product, which can help you identify the main areas holding back your user retention.
Conversion Rates
You will have many different areas of conversion across the customer journey. It’s important to track conversion rates at each stage. This should include conversions like sign-ups, demos booked, purchases, or subscription renewals.
Monitoring these conversion rates helps you understand how effective your product, and product strategy, are at driving the actions you want from customers. This information can help you significantly improve marketing and sales performance.
Feature Adoption
Your product might offer a wide array of features. You must have a clear understanding of how your different product features are used, and which features offer the most value to your users.
To do this, you can track the usage and adoption rates of different features within your product. This can help you quickly identify which features are most popular, and which might need improvement.
If you introduce new features to the product, monitoring this is especially important.
Customer Satisfaction
One of the main reasons to monitor product experience analytics is to improve your customer experience. Accessing direct customer feedback will make the biggest impact here.
You can gather customer feedback directly from your users through things like surveys, ratings, or reviews. This helps you understand their overall satisfaction levels. It can also help you identify areas of your product that customers are unhappy with, which is essential for improving the user experience.
When monitoring customer sentiment, two of the best metrics to track include the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSS).
Onboarding Experience
Product experience analytics don’t only cover product usage. They’re also focused on how people get started with your product and what experiences they have before even using the product. This is where the onboarding experience is valuable to monitor.
Pay attention to how smoothly new users can get started with your product. You can monitor this through metrics like the completion rate of your onboarding steps, the time to first value, or discovering drop-off points during the onboarding process.
This information will help you provide a more streamlined and value-added onboarding process, which significantly boosts customer satisfaction. A good onboarding process will also help each user get the most value out of your product.
Error and Bug Tracking
If you want to enhance your product experience, then you need to make sure your product is working properly. This is why tracking things like errors, crashes, or any other technical issues that users encounter is so important.
Make sure you’re consistently monitoring these areas as part of your product experience analytics. This will help you identify common issues that users face, which means you can prioritize fixes to improve the overall experience of your product.
User Feedback and Support Interactions
Another important element of your product experience is customer support. While this isn’t directly linked to your product performance, customer support does add to the overall customer experience. By offering great support, you can enhance the product experience in a big way.
You can analyze customer support, chat logs, and feedback emails to help you identify recurring issues, customer pain points, or feature requests. Having this information readily available will help you improve your product to better match your customer requests. It can also help guide and prioritize your development efforts more strategically.
Funnel Analysis
As mentioned earlier, your product experience encompasses the entire customer journey. This means you need to look at each stage of the sales funnel to help you understand how customers’ experiences are shaped and where you see successes and failures.
Analyze user behavior and drop-off rates at each step of the user journey. This includes the steps from product discovery through to conversion, and possible retention too. Monitoring this will help you identify possible bottlenecks, friction points, or areas where users could be getting stuck.
Examples of Monitoring Product Experience Analytics
Now that you know what product experience metrics you should be tracking, you’ll need to know how you can track this.
Here are three examples of different ways to monitor analytics across your product lifecycle.
A/B Testing
You can run A/B split tests to compare two different versions of your product against each other and see which one performs best. This is often done when you release a new product or features or product enhancements.
When doing an A/B test, you need to choose specific areas of the product that you differentiate in each test. Now you can monitor the analytics around each variation to see which offers the best engagement and results.
User Journey Analysis
Performing a user journey analysis is when you track every point of contact a user has, from their initial contact with your product right through to converting.
Monitoring this will help you identify the most successful areas of the different stages of the user journey. This will also help you identify areas of friction where users drop off.
Cohort Analysis
A cohort analysis groups users into different based on common characteristics (like their purchase date) and monitors their user behavior over time. This kind of analysis will help you identify levels of engagement and retention across your different customer groups.
Conclusion
The more you track your product experience analytics, the better you’ll understand your product and users. This will help you develop a stronger product, as well as refine your sales strategy to better match your prospects and their interests.
Customer behaviors are always changing, as is technology. This is why it’s so important to consistently measure the right metrics over time. After all, your product experience plays a pivotal role in your sales success.
If you want to enhance the product experience and sales process, you should consider optimizing your product demos. With Saleo, you can create captivating demos. Request a demo today to see how it can transform your sales cycle!
