Jarmany | 15 July 2022
Almost every firm has looked to invest in data initiatives. But you need to do more than that if you want to make the most of your data and the insights it can provide...
The business world has become increasingly competitive in recent years, and as a result, it has never been more difficult for businesses and their products to stand out. To survive in an unforgiving market, it’s crucial to have a competitive edge.
One way to make smarter decisions and outperform competitors is to harness the power of your business's data. Companies that leverage data analytics often make better decisions, helping them become more efficient, cost-effective, and strategic.
That’s why, according to one survey, 99% of firms have invested in data initiatives.1 However, that alone isn’t enough to ensure success. Businesses also need to understand and implement best practices when it comes to data and utilise effective tools.
In this article, we’re going to focus on a data analytics technique that can help you drive long-term success through smarter product decisions — product performance analysis.
As the name suggests, product performance analysis is the process of using data to analyse product performance and subsequently glean actionable insights. For example, you might learn:
Product managers can then use these insights to guide their decision-making process, allowing them to optimise product performance, improve the user experience, and drive towards product-related KPIs.
In ultra-competitive markets, gaining insights into your product’s performance and the way users interact with it can give you a competitive advantage and help to ensure success in the long term.
On top of that, data can also provide insights into how products are performing on affiliate sites. Data analytics can help bridge this gap with web scraping technology that provides insights with regards to share of voice (SoV), the customer journey and how customers are interacting with these sites.
Without these and other data-driven insights, you are left with basic performance metrics like product sales or the number of new customers acquired. These metrics are useful as a fundamental indicator of the success of a product or service, but they don’t provide any context as to why a product is successful or otherwise.
Product performance analysis allows you to drill down into the factors behind a product’s success or failure, providing the following benefits:
Now we’ve discussed some of the benefits, let’s focus on how to conduct product performance analysis. Here are some key steps to understand before you implement them in your business.
Align data needs with business goals
This is crucial. Before you start thinking about results, it is critical that you understand and outline your business goals. This will help you define the specific metrics you need to track and the data sources you will use.
Build a data tracking plan
One way to ensure that your analytics efforts are coherent and in line with your wider business goals is to build a data tracking plan. Essentially, a tracking plan helps you to:
Collect user actions
Once your plan is set up and you have determined the user actions you want to track, it’s time to implement the plan. This involves instrumenting your product to collect the relevant data. Make sure you understand which user actions relate to which key metrics.
You can then analyse this data to gain actionable insights that help you make smarter decisions about the direction of your product and marketing operations.
Ensure that you have the right skills and expertise
Like any branch of data analytics, product performance analytics is an esoteric discipline that requires the right skills and expertise to be successful. Data analytics is also a fast-evolving discipline, making it difficult to keep up with the latest trends and techniques.
A poorly executed analysis will likely lead to inaccurate or irrelevant data points. This can lead to false assumptions, which in turn leads to poor decision-making.
To reap the benefits of product performance analysis, you will need to make sure you have the right skills in-house. In many cases, this means hiring new staff or upskilling existing ones.
Alternatively, you can outsource your analytics processes to an external partner, allowing you access to all the benefits of product performance analytics without having to make major internal changes.
Use the right metrics and analysis techniques
There is a whole range of metrics and analysis techniques you can use when performing a product performance analysis. The approaches you choose will depend on your specific product and the business goals that are underpinning your efforts. Here are some examples:
As we have already touched on, product performance analysis — and data analytics in general — is a complex process that requires a specific set of skills and expertise. Given the dynamic nature of this discipline, many companies have a skills gap that must be addressed if they are to successfully handle analytics in-house.
Fortunately, there are ways businesses can overcome this and benefit from the power of data analytics. For example, partnering with a trusted third party that specialises in data analytics allows you to maximise the potential of techniques such as product performance analysis.
At Jarmany, that’s exactly what we offer our clients. As one of the UK’s leading analytics specialists, we have the expertise, skills, and tools you need to turn raw data into actionable insights. We also work with outside partners to provide additional insights around performance on third-party retailer sites, giving you a full picture of product performance.
By working with us you can gain all the benefits of a thorough product performance analysis with none of the risk or hassle. If that sounds interesting, contact us today to find out more.