In the past, product and marketing teams had different objectives and limited interactions.
The marketing team focused mainly on customer acquisition and cared about key performance indicators (KPIs) like customer acquisition cost (CAC) and ad spend. On the other side of the fence was product management, focused on building the best digital product and retaining customers.
With different focuses and little collaboration, it’s no surprise that organizations implemented two tools—one for marketing analytics and one for product analytics, on top of a myriad of other platforms for different organizational use cases. According to BetterCloud‘s “State of SaaS Ops 2023” report, organizations use an average of 130 SaaS apps.
This proliferation of point solutions meant teams had to manually stitch data together, leading to inconsistencies, competing or misaligned priorities, and a poor, disjointed customer experience.
Thankfully, internal and external factors have led many organizations to knock down these fences and blur the lines between product and marketing—in their customers’ best interest. These factors include heightened customer expectations across their entire journey, an increased focus on customer retention, and more.
As marketing and product teams align behind shared goals and objectives, the shortcomings of disparate marketing and product analytics systems have become very clear. That’s why leading organizations around the globe are adopting an all-in-one approach to digital analytics.
Let’s explore the 5 benefits of saying “goodbye” to the data mayhem of fragmented marketing and product analytics point solutions and “hello” to better insights with a unified digital analytics platform.
1. Unlock a better understanding of your holistic customer experience
Optimizing your customer journey requires a deep understanding of what customers are doing and where they’re facing challenges. It requires diving into every customer interaction across every channel, platform, and touchpoint. Getting insight into every customer transaction is critical to driving acquisition and monetization because it helps you answer the following questions:
- How many total steps do customers take to convert?
- Which process steps cause the most significant drop-off?
- How long does it take for customers to complete their goals?
- Which channels perform better than others?
- Are a combination of channels having a synergistic effect?
Without this data, you’re likely flying blind. You might know where your customers are coming from, but you might not understand what makes them stay, leave, or become customers for life.
Suppose you’re using a marketing analytics platform like Google Analytics that only captures acquisition via the website experience but doesn’t capture product usage data. You could answer some, but not all, of the questions above.
However, an all-in-one digital analytics platform like Amplitude delivers comprehensive customer journey mapping with the ability to view customer interactions across all platforms and channels and filter by segment or cohort to analyze the journeys of specific groups of users.
Homebot gains a holistic view of customer behavior
When a combination of Google Analytics, Metabase, and Tableau generated nebulous customer journey insights, Homebot pivoted to Amplitude.
“Google Analytics offers limited event tracking,” shares Leia Schultz. “We needed more confidence in what we saw and a better holistic view of what our customers did online.”
Through Amplitude Analytics, Amplitude Experiment, and Amplitude CDP, Homebot gained an all-in-one platform offering rock-solid data to create features and content to engage specific cohorts more effectively along their journey.
2. Increase collaboration
The first step in uniting your team behind a common goal is getting everyone on the same page. Using disparate analytics tools for marketing and product teams only perpetuates finger-pointing and silos, and hinders your ability to create a collaborative culture.
Unifying teams’ analytics into one platform gets marketing and product speaking the same language and aligned behind one view of the truth.
Although we started as a product-side platform, recognizing the importance of unifying marketing and product analytics, we’ve doubled down on our efforts extending our solution to encompass marketing-side needs.
We introduced an end-to-end digital analytics platform for marketing and product analytics with capabilities like acquisition channels, multi-touch attribution, advertising metric imports, and other marketing features. Our platform makes it easy for product and marketing teams alike to get a complete picture of customer behavior via one unified solution.
Haven improves collaboration by unifying teams behind a unified solution
When Google announced they were decommissioning Universal Analytics and moving everyone to Google Analytics 4, Haven started looking for alternatives.
“The majority of tools we reviewed are very good at product analytics, but they didn’t tick the box well enough for marketing analytics, such as the ability to understand your channels, campaigns, and attribution,” says Dan Grainger, Head of Analytics at Haven.
The team selected Amplitude and quickly started reaping the benefits.
“I’d been blown away by the tool from a product analytics perspective,” he continues, “but the best sign was how heavily Amplitude was throwing resources into enhancing the marketing-focused capabilities. They knew what they were doing, clearly moving towards a world of joined-up product and marketing analytics.”
Amplitude enables the team to see whether things are working how they should and if they’re providing guests and owners with a consistent experience.
3. Improve efficiency and adoption
Using a unified digital analytics platform has obvious efficiency advantages, like eliminating time spent stitching data from disparate sources and fewer platforms. However, requiring your teams to access only one system for marketing and product analytics also makes it easier for them to learn how to use it and help themselves—boosting adoption.
The best all-in-one digital analytics platforms have self-service capabilities to put your data directly into the hands of those who need it—marketers and product managers. These self-service models should be easy to access and use without requiring complex language or data analytics expertise.
Amplitude was built with easy self-service in mind from the start. You don’t need to understand SQL and can easily generate and visualize insights leveraging trusted data. All this increased efficiency means accelerating your time to action and freeing up valuable time to develop more effective marketing and product strategies.
Shift empowers stakeholders and drives adoption with Amplitude
The used-car marketplace Shift uses Amplitude to empower product managers and designers to answer questions quickly and make better, faster decisions. Shifting from a lengthy process that required complicated SQL queries to a self-service approach has enabled the team to create a data-driven culture where every person has easy access to uncover opportunities within their product.
4. Streamline experimentation
Your digital analytics process doesn’t stop at gathering insights—you want to act on them. Experimenting and testing solutions based on your insights is critical to improving digital products and experiences.
In the digital world, you can prove hypotheses and rapidly iterate to improve experiences quickly. You can use data analytics to identify an issue or opportunity and then use experimentation to test and learn which features, content, or experiences you can implement to resolve or improve.
The synergies between digital analytics and experimentation products are why unified digital analytics products include experimentation as part of the overall solution. Instead of integrating an additional experimentation platform, you can use a platform like Amplitude, which has analytics and experimentation built in.
Amplitude Experiment enables you to perform advanced A/B tests, experiments, feature flagging, and content personalization.
MySwimPro iterates quickly and improves KPIs with unified analytics and experimentation
MySwimPro, turned to Amplitude when Google Analytics and custom data pipeline tools were hindering their ability to grow.
“The main problem we were trying to solve was speed, and by bringing analytics and experiments into a single system, I was confident we could experiment, iterate, and improve faster,” shares Nick Newell, VP of Engineering at MySwimPro.
And Nick’s confidence paid off—in two months, they ran three experiments around monetization and pricing that led to 70%, 53%, and 39% increases in average revenue per user (ARPU), respectively.
5. Reduce costs
The math is simple—buying and maintaining disparate systems is typically more expensive than unifying capabilities with an all-in-one platform.
Whether you’re thinking of downsizing the breadth of tools or cutting time spent maintaining solutions, there are multiple ways to cut costs.
You can think of total cost of ownership as:
- License cost: How much money you pay a vendor for software is the first thing we usually think of regarding costs, but it’s not the only consideration
- Cost of adoption: How easy is the tool to adopt, and how many users can use it? Low adoption can lead to additional costs over time. For example, you may need a Consulting engagement to get the insights you’re looking for.
- Cost of implementation and training: How many engineering resources are needed to implement SDKs and data pipelines?
- Cost of data: How many copies of the data will you pay for?
- Cost of data silos: Do you have a holistic view of your customer or business?
- Cost of integrations: How many are out of the box vs. custom builds?
Disparate analytics platforms can make it difficult to scale, and costs compound over time. And when you factor in the potential cost savings associated with benefits one through four above, it’s clear why more and more companies are switching to a consolidated digital analytics approach.
Improve outcomes and deliver better digital experiences with Amplitude
So, if you want to get a better overall picture of your customer experience, increase collaboration, improve efficiency and adoption, streamline experimentation, or reduce costs, consolidating your analytics stack might be the answer.
Amplitude recognizes the importance of bringing marketing and product analytics together in one unified solution, making it easy for product and marketing teams alike to get a complete picture of customer behavior, collaborate more effectively, and accelerate time to action.
That’s why more and more companies trust Amplitude over Google Analytics (GA) to meet their modern digital analytics needs. Google’s decision to sunset its flagship analytics product, GA Universal, coupled with its lack of a fully unified solution for both product and marketing analytics needs, has driven many organizations to look for more.
Check out our new guide, “Top 10 Reasons Leading Organizations Choose Amplitude Over Google Analytics,” and discover why product and marketing teams around the globe are switching to Amplitude for all-in-one data analytics.
