Why Product Teams Need Real-Time Product Analytics

For today’s most competitive product teams, no tool is more essential than product analytics. It’s easy to understand why–in this rapid-paced, increasingly digital world, analytics have proven themselves time and time again to be key to optimized business. In fact, the product analytics market is expected to grow from $9.6 billion since 2021 to $25.3 billion by 2026. As the demand for a better product analytics platform grows, so does the need for product teams to keep up.

While the importance of product analytics to track, understand, and analyze customer data cannot be overstated, many product teams may be surprised to learn their businesses’ analytics platform has one glaring weakness: it’s not real-time.

Read on to learn more about how real-time analytics can improve product insights and optimize your product.

What is product analytics?

Product analytics is the process of analyzing how users engage with a product or service, allowing product teams to track, visualize, and analyze user engagement and behavior. In short, product analytics tell you how, what, where, and who is using your product. Here are some benefits of product analytics:

• Increasing product retention: When asked if their businesses would be satisfied with a 95% monthly product retention rate, a majority of those surveyed responded enthusiastically. By tracking both the acquisition and referral of new users, product analytics provide product teams with necessary insights that will bring in new users and nurture the ones they have.

• Segmenting users: Data is power, and no data is more powerful to product managers than knowing where their customers are coming from. Segmenting users based on factors–such as preferred user channels or other behaviors–to personalize a user experience can create more meaningful, engaging interactions with your product. In fact, 86% of buyers will pay more for a product for a better customer experience.

• Pinpoint areas of friction, pain points, and drop-offs: Knowing exactly when and where a product lost its customer allows product teams to rectify pain points, improve their product, and maintain product retention. By following a customer’s journey and interaction with a product, teams can optimize those experiences. 

• Reduce churn: Churn is a major problem for most businesses, given it’s 5 to 25 times more expensive to find a new customer than to retain an existing one. Remember: a happy customer is a repeat customer! The ability to track customer satisfaction with your product is an essential tool to help you understand who is happy, who isn’t, and how to win over your users.

Product analytics work in tandem with marketing and customer experience analytics to leverage data for better insights and drive revenue. However, without real-time, product analytics isn't living up to its full potential.

Challenges of product analytics without real-time

Just as CDPs are a core tool for marketers, product analytics are an essential piece of any product team’s toolkit. However, teams that utilize product analytics without real-time may fall victim to these common pitfalls:

• Stale insights: Staying informed of user behavior in real-time is key to optimizing a product or service. The older your user analytics are, the insights will be less accurate and informative than they could be. Near real-time analytics keep you one step behind your users, and give you insights that might no longer be relevant.

• Missed opportunities: When customers encounter friction points, businesses have a limited window of opportunity to address the situation. At best, these opportunities could result in upsells or recovering abandoned carts; at worst, a customer may have already left your site and chosen to buy from your competition. Without real-time analytics, you’re leaving money on the table.

• Sub-optimal product insights: How much faith can you have in a product if you’re working with incomplete data? Poor insights gleaned from sub-optimal product analytics can trickle down to every facet of your organization. Without real-time, you may be undermining your marketing campaigns or product without even knowing.

• Misunderstanding customer journeys with a product or service: Traditional analytics may provide insight on specific touchpoints, but real-time provides context to increasingly complex and omnichannel customer journeys. How did the customer get here? Where will the customer go next? Understanding your customer’s journey requires real-time analytics capable of painting the whole picture.

• Siloed data & bottlenecks: Most of today’s competitive businesses utilize various platforms to manage user data–like CRMs, CDPs, and DMPs. However, each of these platforms may create separate, incompatible data reports, resulting in siloed data and data bottlenecks. A recent study found that over half of data-intensive businesses, 54%, believe their biggest barrier to leveraging data is fragmented or siloed data. Time is money, and the longer it takes to unify disparate data streams, the greater expense to your business.

5 ways real-time improves product analytics

Product managers can overcome these problems by supplementing with real-time analytics. Real-time can improve your product analytics in the following ways:

• Get fresh, live data: The fresher the data, the greater the window of opportunity you have to optimize your product. Whether it's rectifying pain points at the moment, experimenting with new marketing campaigns, or getting live alerts, the importance of fresh data cannot be overstated.

• Optimize your product based on real-time events: By optimizing content that’s timely or performing well, businesses can dramatically increase their opportunities to engage with users. In one use case with Scuba, ExpertVoice - which runs 1,000 to 4,000 queries per day - leverages real-time to understand how new and existing features perform, and can build custom dashboards to further explore insights.

• Instantaneously improve customer experience with a product: Interacting with customer journeys as they happen gives your product an edge. Businesses utilizing traditional platforms are only analyzing completed journeys after they’ve happened–real-time analytics flips businesses from passive observers into active teams.

• Improve customer experience with a product in real-time: Oracle found 84% of companies that worked to improve customer experience saw an increase in their revenue–and no tool allows greater control of a customer’s experience than real-time analytics. Businesses utilizing traditional platforms are limited to analyzing customers’ completed journeys. By interacting with customer journeys as they happen, businesses are transformed from passive observers into active participants. 

• Gain a more granular view of product performance and user interaction: Tracking customer journeys across multiple marketing channels is more accessible than ever with real-time analytics. If a user sees a phone ad for your product, then later researches the product on their laptop, before finally purchasing the product on their tablet, real-time product analytics can weave all those disparate channels together into a cohesive report–as these events happen.

• Make faster business decisions: The faster you can spot trends, the faster you can act upon them. Real-time analytics empower you to gain insights and make decisions without relying on other departments or expensive, time-consuming analyst requests.

Elevate your product analytics with Scuba

In today’s digital market, product teams need dynamic, real-time analytics to keep up with user needs and product optimization. Scuba’s customer intelligence platform does just that. It operates in real-time, providing your team with the most up-to-date, accurate, and comprehensive analytics: 

• Comprehensive real-time product analytics paired with granular visualizations and dashboards
• Interactive tools to help you easily visualize complex customer journeys and product analyses
• Set up complex product alerts and rapidly respond to changes or issues
• Live and continuously updated data analytics for in-the-moment product insights
• Unify disparate data sources and democratize access across departmental boundaries
• Build and explore with no-code queries 
• Remove organizational bottlenecks and delays with self-service analytics

Leverage Scuba’s real-time customer intelligence to elevate your product analytics and gain rapid, actionable insights.

Want to learn more about how Scuba can help you improve your product analytics? Request a demo today or talk to a Scuba expert.