Our October meetup featured Martijn Scheijbeler from RVShare talking about what “Product Analytics” means and how it’s different than Web Analytics. Since there’s no days of the week that start with “P” we aren’t going to be renaming “Web Analytics Wednesday” to “Product Analytics Pieday” (although we are open to the idea of a pie-oriented day), but that shouldn’t stop us from thinking more deeply about how to bring a more product-oriented perspective into our measurement practices.

Traditional web analytics works based upon sessions & pageviews. Having run Web Analytics Wednesdays for the last 11 years we feel  pretty confident in this assessment. This paradigm works well for aggregate stats about our sites, but when trying do user-based analysis of a whole product from a holistic perspective this method can really start to break down. Adding event tracking helps, but in traditional tools like Google Analytics events lack the deeper context to answer a lot of the questions about how these different events fit together into one user experience.

So what do we do? Once we’ve hit the goal & custom dimension limit in GA do we just need to start rolling our own complicated in-house analytics tools??

Luckily, Martijn just happened to bring along with him someone eminently qualified to show us what might be next! (Ok, they are married so “just happened” may be an overstatement). Our surprise guest was Krista Seiden, Founder & Principal Consultant from KS Digital, and well-known as a former Google Analytics Advocate at Google.

While at Google Krista most recently worked on the newest version and future direction of GA, App + Web properties. Krista’s blog is one of the best sources of information on this new version of GA, which takes an events-first approach and addresses many of the challenges Martijn had been talking about. Of course, A+W is still in Beta and even in full release is not going to solve all of the issues  discussed, but it is far more than just a way to consolidate mobile app and website stats. Both of our speakers also mentioned a number of other tools working to take our analytics up to this next level (Segment, Snowplow, Heap, Mixpanel, etc.) including many that do already take the events-first approach that A+W has adopted.

Martijn has also kindly provided us with his slides:

Please join us at Rev1 again next month when Elizabeth Eckels will talk about the world of contracting & consulting in Columbus.

Other Upcoming Events & Conferences:

Oct 23-24, DAA One Conference, Chicago
Oct 24, Market Research Exchange Fall Conference
Nov 6-7, Business Agility Conference Midwest