Pressure is pushing down on product leaders and managers to deliver an unbeatable user experience—and for good reason.
Mastering the user experience can drive up everything from revenue and engagement to product growth.
What you may not realize is that user analytics can lift that weight off of your shoulders and make it easy for you to deliver an excellent product experience. Wondering how? In this article, we dive into user analytics and show you how to use this powerful set of tools to ignite product growth.
What is user analytics?
User analytics is a process that includes gathering and examining data about your users. With user analytics, you dig into how a user is experiencing, adopting, and engaging with your product. Also, this methodology can lean on user behavior analytics. This subset of data highlights the actions your users take, what they prefer, and how they react to the in-product decisions you make.
Why are user behavior analytics important?
User behavior analytics allow you to gaze into the user experience and understand how users are traveling through your product. This insight isn’t just valuable; it’s critical in the modern SaaS world. With so many products relying on recurring revenue models to excel, the best way to keep users logging in is to constantly refine the product to meet their needs.
Behavior analytics lays down valuable user data at your fingertips, making it easy to boost the user experience, lift profit, and drive product-led growth.
How can you leverage user analytics and drive growth?
When you couple it with a sound strategy, user analytics can boost long-term product growth. Here are a few tips to help you squeeze the most out of user analytics:
Tap into behavioral segmentation.
If you want to impress your users, you need to know who they are. That’s what makes behavioral segmentation so powerful. This tool allows you to dive into user details, split them into clear segments, and use that info to meet more individual needs.
For instance, imagine you notice a distinct group of users that are only interested in free trials and another that loves premium access. Once you spot these segments, you may decide to try speeding up time to value for the free trial group while exposing premium members to more exclusive opportunities. In all cases, behavioral segmentation makes it easy to deliver a more targeted, personal user experience.
Track your user’s path.
One of the easiest ways to make high-impact decisions is to shadow your user and potential customers as they travel through your product. Path and funnel analysis let you do just that. With path analysis, you can see how users move from one stage or feature of your product to the next. That means you can clearly see where they’re falling off, stumbling, or overlooking important features.
That insight is invaluable if you want to spot and eliminate friction. For instance, imagine you want to understand how new users move through the first mile of your product. With path analysis, you can see how they naturally flow, identify unexpected points where they drift from your predicted path, and create a plan to nudge them in the direction you want. By seeing obstacles and removing them, you’ll be actively improving your user’s experience and boosting your product’s value.
Improve user experience with engagements.
When you see users are dropping off or giving up, it’s a good indication that they need more direction. It’s natural for users to get frustrated or log off when they run into a feature or product offering they don’t fully understand. This is where in-app engagements supercharge the user’s experience.
With these tools, you drop in contextual engagements at those low engagement points that you’ve identified through your product analytics and user path analysis. If you see users are getting to a new feature and veering off course, you may decide to drop in a guide, checklist, or dialogue to get them over the hump. These little moments of encouragement can create a bridge that carries users on to the valuable features your team has spent so much time crafting.
Identify and enhance sticky features.
Every product has golden features that users love. In many cases, your sticky features are sitting within your product with untapped potential waiting to be unleashed. That’s why it’s so important to use user analytics to identify and improve sticky features. By spotting these sticky features and clearing the path to them, you’ll be getting more value out of the best parts of your product—and that can catapult growth. You can identify these features by conducting a feature level retention analysis. retention analysis shows how often your users are coming back. when you do this at the feature level you are able to correlate their retention to specific features.
Use analytics to craft a masterful product roadmap.
In-depth user analytics can hand you the materials to build a strong product roadmap that fast-tracks product growth. And Gainsight PX gives you unique reports that are built specifically to help product leaders and managers succeed. For instance, you can access cohort analysis to personalize your plans in a way that fits each user’s needs. Or you can examine user retention by a specific feature to identify the most direct path to higher retention.
Want to unlock more insider secrets to enhance your product roadmap? Download “The Executive Guide to Building a Customer-Centric Product Roadmap” now to learn how to build an analytics-driven roadmap.
