What is digital analytics?
Digital analytics measures behaviour across every digital channel, not just a website. What it includes and how it differs from web and product analytics.
What is digital analytics?
Digital analytics is the measurement and analysis of customer behaviour across every digital channel a business operates: website, mobile app, email, advertising platforms, support and in-product usage. It is broader than web analytics, which covers a single website, and its central difficulty is joining those channels into one coherent picture.
Three overlapping disciplines
The labels are used loosely and the distinction is one of scope rather than of technique. Knowing which one someone means saves a lot of confused meetings.
| Web analytics | Product analytics | Digital analytics | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scope | One website | One product, usually behind a login | Every digital channel |
| Primary question | Where does traffic come from and what does it do? | What do users do inside the product, and do they stay? | How does the whole journey perform end to end? |
| Core unit | The session | The user | The customer across channels |
| Typical owner | Marketing | Product | Analytics or data team |
| Hardest part | Blocking and attribution gaps | Defining activation honestly | Identity resolution across channels |
What it covers beyond the website
Digital analytics takes in every place a customer meets you digitally, and each source has its own shape and its own failure modes.
- The website: traffic, campaigns, conversions.
- Mobile apps: installs, sessions, in-app events, which are measured through a completely different SDK model.
- Email: sends, clicks, and open rates that are now unreliable because mail proxies pre-fetch tracking pixels.
- Advertising platforms: impressions, spend and platform-reported conversions, which almost never match your own numbers.
- In-product usage, support tickets, and revenue systems.
The value is in the joins, and the joins are the hard part. Without a shared identifier, each channel is a separate report and the customer journey stays hypothetical.
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Where digital analytics programmes fail
No shared identity
Without a common key, usually an account id or a hashed email, five channels produce five disconnected reports and no journey. This is the single biggest cause of failure.
Platform numbers taken at face value
Ad platforms report conversions using their own attribution and their own windows, and they always report more than your analytics. Both are internally consistent and neither is the truth.
Metrics that mean different things per channel
A session in a mobile SDK, a session in web analytics and a session in an email tool are three different constructs. Adding them produces a number with no meaning.
Modelling before measuring
Teams build a unified data model before any single channel is instrumented correctly. Get one channel honest first, then join.
A realistic starting point
Most companies under a hundred people do not need a warehouse and an identity graph. They need three things done properly.
- Consistent campaign tagging, so every channel that can carry a UTM does.
- One place where conversions and revenue are recorded, so the outcome layer is not split across tools.
- A self-reported source field at signup, which catches the channels no instrumentation sees.
Mrkr covers the web and product side of that: pageviews, campaigns, custom events and revenue in one place, with an HTTP API so backend and app events land in the same stream. It is one input to a digital analytics practice, not the whole of it, and pretending otherwise would not help you.
Questions, answered.
Related terms.
- What is web analytics?
Web analytics is the collection, measurement and analysis of what happens on a website: who visits, where they came from, which pages they see, and what they do before they leave.
- What is product analytics?
Product analytics is the measurement of what people do inside a product rather than how they arrived at it.
- What is attribution model?
An attribution model is the rule that decides which marketing touchpoints get credit for a conversion when a customer interacted with several before buying.
- What is first-party data?
First-party data is information you collect directly from your own audience on your own properties: site behaviour, purchases, support conversations, and anything customers tell you.
- What is event?
An event is any recorded action beyond loading a page: a button click, a form submitted, a video played, a subscription upgraded.
Where this shows up in Mrkr
- Send events from any channel into Mrkr with the HTTP API
Backend, app and web events landing in one stream.
- Tie channels to revenue with Mrkr revenue attribution
- Browse the full analytics glossary
Every metric, method and privacy term, defined in one place.
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