What is product analytics?
Product analytics measures what users do inside a product: activation, adoption, retention. How it differs from web analytics and how to instrument it.
What is product analytics?
Product analytics is the measurement of what people do inside a product rather than how they arrived at it. It tracks feature usage, activation, habit formation and retention, usually for signed-in users, and its unit of analysis is the user over time rather than the session.
How it differs from web analytics
Web analytics is organised around the session: where it came from, what it did, whether it converted. Product analytics is organised around the user across many sessions: whether they came back, what they adopted, whether they stayed.
That difference in unit changes almost everything downstream. Product analytics needs durable identity, because a question like does someone who uses feature X in week one still use the product in week eight is unanswerable without knowing it is the same person.
It also uses different methods. Cohorts and retention curves are the core of product analytics; source and campaign reporting are the core of web analytics. Funnels are the one thing both use heavily, at different points in the journey.
The four questions product analytics answers
Activation
Do new users reach the point where the product delivers value, and how long does it take? Define the activation event precisely, then measure the share of signups reaching it in the first week.
Adoption
Which features are actually used, by whom, and how often? Usually reveals that a small subset carries the product and a long tail carries nothing.
Habit
Does usage become regular? DAU/MAU, or the weekly equivalent, is the standard measure of whether a product became part of someone's routine.
Retention
Do cohorts flatten, or slide toward zero? The single most predictive thing you can know about a product's future.
See it on real data
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Open the live demoInstrumenting it without drowning in events
The common failure is instrumenting everything. Three hundred events with inconsistent names is worse than twenty with a convention, because nobody trusts any of them.
A workable approach: name events object-action, in one tense, lowercase, with a written list. Report created, invite sent, subscription upgraded. Put properties on the event rather than encoding them in the name, so report-created-pdf and report-created-csv become one event with a format property.
Then instrument the activation event first, the retention-defining event second, and everything else only when someone has a specific question. Events you added speculatively are the ones nobody can define six months later.
Product analytics in Mrkr
Mrkr supports custom events with properties and optional revenue values, funnels across those events, and cohort and retention analysis built on them. Events can arrive from the browser tracker or from your backend over the HTTP API.
The identity question is the honest constraint. Product analytics needs to recognise the same user across weeks, and Mrkr's default cookieless mode deliberately rotates its identifier daily. For product work you attach your own user id to events once someone is signed in, which is the most accurate option anyway, or you enable the optional per-site cookie mode and accept the consent requirement that comes with it.
That means Mrkr covers product analytics well for logged-in products where you can supply an id, and covers the anonymous top of the funnel cookielessly. Being clear about which half is which is more useful than claiming both work identically.
Questions, answered.
Related terms.
- What is cohort analysis?
Cohort analysis groups users by something they share, usually the week or month they signed up, then tracks each group separately over time.
- What is retention rate?
Retention rate is the share of users from a starting group who are still active at the end of a defined period.
- What is dau/mau ratio?
DAU/MAU is daily active users divided by monthly active users, expressed as a percentage.
- 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.
- What is north star metric?
A north star metric is the single number a company chooses to represent the core value its product delivers to customers.
Where this shows up in Mrkr
- Run cohort and retention analysis on your own events in Mrkr
The core product analytics methods, built on the events you already send.
- Write a tracking plan before you instrument anything
- Browse the full analytics glossary
Every metric, method and privacy term, defined in one place.
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