3 Signs That It’s Time to Reevaluate Your Digital Analytics Platform

Everyone wants to derive actionable insights from their data. After all, data is central to understanding customer behavior, which ultimately helps acquire and retain customers, increasing revenue.

But today’s organizations have so. much. data!

With customer journeys that traverse multiple devices, products, and platforms—sometimes simultaneously—making sense of what customers are actually doing online and in your product can be challenging.

Unfortunately, too many organizations invest loads of money, time, and effort into their analytics solutions, only to be disappointed. Disappointed that they:

• need yet another analytics solution to capture another part of the customer journey.
• can’t meet the needs of all their teams in one solution.
• still have to rely on sophisticated data expertise to make sense of what’s happening.

The good news is that modern digital analytics solutions can alleviate these frustrations.

Are you in need of an analytics upgrade? These three signs indicate that it’s time to consider alternatives to your current analytics stack.

1. You don’t have a complete picture of your customer journey

The proliferation of digital products in consumer and B2B industries means businesses need deeper insights across the entire customer journey. With digital products in particular, the product experience is just as important as the buying experience—understanding customer interactions at each stage is crucial for businesses to identify areas for improvement.

Leading organizations don’t just want web analytics built for top-of-funnel marketing acquisition. They want to combine marketing and product analytics into a complete picture of the customer experience. I'm talking deep, real-time behavioral insights into the entire customer journey across their website and product.

To assess the effectiveness of your current analytics stack, consider:

• Do you get value from your current analytics tool? Or are you just using it because it’s been there for years?
• Can you see what customers are doing in your product?
• Can you create cohorts to associate specific behaviors with different acquisition channels?
• Do you understand what makes your customers churn?

If you answered “no” to any of the questions above, reevaluate your solution. A complete analytics solution should be purpose-built for digital products and support both web analytics and marketing attribution.

A complete and holistic understanding of customers

Amplitude helps teams to make sense of multi-touchpoint, non-linear customer journeys across multiple devices. Identity resolution with Amplitude enables you to identify users as they log in and out of your products and switch devices. Amplitude also operates an open ecosystem, so teams can integrate with other tools they already use. A seamless data flow between Amplitude and other systems ensures data is always up-to-date, providing an accurate view of user behavior.

While keeping track of key metrics is essential, understanding the why behind product trends is also important. Session replay provides a qualitative view of user interactions so teams can understand connections between different in-product behaviors. Comparing expected user paths with actual customer behavior enables your teams to better understand customers’ needs and adapt your products accordingly.

2. You’re using different analytics tools across teams

A unified customer experience is built by unified teams working with a unified system. Yet, it’s not unusual for companies to use multiple analytics solutions across marketing, product, and data teams. Marketing uses one tool to analyze acquisition and campaign performance; product uses another for user engagement and experience analysis; customer service uses yet another to extract customer conversation insights.

With so many different teams working out of so many different systems, you don’t have a single source of truth—making it impossible to fully understand your customer and product experience.

As customer data grows exponentially, data now sits across more silos than ever. It’s no wonder organizations still struggle to get all their teams on the same page and unified behind common goals.

Fractured data also prevents organizations from improving the customer experience—research shows data silos are one of the main barriers to personalization. To assess your current analytics stack, consider these questions:

• How many analytics systems does your organization have contracts for?
• How effectively do your marketing and product teams collaborate?
• Are there any gaps in customer insights due to disparate analytics tools?
• Does using multiple analytics systems affect your organization’s ability to comply with data privacy regulations?
• How many resources are spent integrating data from various analytics tools?
• How do data silos impact your organization’s ability to personalize customer experiences effectively?

If you’re unsatisfied with your answers to these questions, know you’re not alone. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Fortunately, today’s best digital analytics solutions can provide all the insights different teams need in one place, breaking down data silos and facilitating collaboration across teams.

A unified and collaborative approach to data

Amplitude gives marketers and product teams access to insights across the customer journey in one platform, reducing the need for additional systems. But simply accessing data isn’t enough. Amplitude makes it easy for teams to collaborate and act.

The real value of a digital analytics platform lies in the insights derived from the data and the subsequent decisions made. To communicate the findings of analyses and garner support for proposed changes, it’s essential to present data in a compelling, understandable way.

Amplitude notebooks—documents made up of text blocks, pictures, videos, charts, chart takeaways, and summary metrics—help with data storytelling. They enable you to explain insights to teammates with relevant context so you can all make better-informed decisions. Within the Amplitude platform, users can also collaborate by leaving comments and tagging other team members.

Team spaces help users work together on analyses and organize content within Amplitude. They enable easy collaboration by providing a streamlined and organized approach to handling and sharing analytical insights.

3. You’re reliant on data teams to extract insights

Regardless of industry and product, it’s important that business decision makers at all organizational levels think and act quickly to stay ahead of rapidly changing environments—and this requires data.

More and more organizations are realizing the value of data democratization, which means giving all users the access, tools, and skills they need to work with data. If your analytics solution is too complex, adoption will be limited to those with data science expertise, locking out most of your organization from valuable insights.

The overreliance on data science teams not only impedes speed to decision making but also employee engagement. Accenture research finds that 74% of employees feel unhappy or overwhelmed when working with data, and only 25% feel prepared to use data effectively.

To assess the level of data democratization provided by your current analytics tool, consider:

• How accessible is the analytics tool to non-data professionals in your organization?
• Can decision makers at various organizational levels independently extract insights from data without needing a data team?
• What percentage of your employees can use your analytics tools effectively?
• How does the complexity of your analytics tools impact the speed of decision making in your organization?

Your analytics tools don't have to be complicated to be powerful. The best car money can buy might have a customizable dashboard to optimize your fuel usage and route efficiency (if you want), but it will also get you from A to B without any hassle.

While Amplitude has advanced features to enable data-savvy folk to do things like create cumulative exposure graphs and test multiple hypotheses at once, a marketer with no knowledge of SQL can just as easily pull insights and run data-driven campaigns.

Actionable insights for the whole organization

At Amplitude, we know that reliance on data teams can reinforce silos and data democratization is about more than just access to dashboards. Our approach to self-serve data is team-focused, collaborative, and geared toward driving action.

We give individual users access to data while promoting collaboration and data literacy. We’ve introduced conversational AI to our analysis experience so teams can ask questions in plain language and get suggested results.

Automated reports and templates also give new users immediate value and inspire them to explore more. They can start an analysis, create a notebook, and share it with someone else in their organization to get feedback.

As a result, data bottlenecks disappear, freeing expensive data science resources to work on more complicated problems—while maintaining alignment and communication across the organization. Teams can run experiments and act faster, which fosters a data- and customer-obsessed culture.

Improve outcomes and deliver better digital experiences with Amplitude

If you don’t have a complete view of your customer journey, your teams can’t easily collaborate, and only data specialists can answer data questions in your organization, it might be time to consider a new analytics solution.

Unlike traditional analytics solutions—like Adobe Analytics—Amplitude gives you a 360° view of the entire customer journey, plus self-serve analytics so everyone can access, understand, collaborate, and take action with data.