Product Analytics: Guide for Product Owners in 2025

For product owners, leveraging data is not just an advantage—it’s a necessity. Product analytics empowers you to understand gaps in your offering and how users engage with your product.  

Both embedded analytics and product analytics are designed to help product owners in diverse ways. Not knowing their advantages and relationships, places you at a severe disadvantage with a crucial lack of visibility and end-user satisfaction. 

 
This guide will explain the following core areas:  

1. What is product analytics?
   1. What product analytics is and why it matters
   2. How to implement product analytics tools effectively
2. What is embedded analytics?
   1. Defining embedded analytics and its role
   2. How embedded analytics transforms product analytics
3. How do they work together?
   1. Why embedded analytics adds value to your data strategy
   2. The difference between product analytics and embedded analytics

Without data-driven insights, your product risks falling behind competitors who make better-informed decisions. Let’s demystify and take a deep dive into product analytics, its relationship to embedded analytics, and how both can drive your product’s success! 

What Is Product Analytics? 

At its core, product analytics is the process of collecting, analyzing, and acting on data related to how users interact with your product. Whether it’s a mobile app, a web platform, or a SaaS tool, understanding user behavior is critical for improving performance. 

Let’s consider an example: Imagine you’re a product manager for a mobile app, and you notice that users are abandoning the app at the sign-up stage. With product analytics, you can track exactly where users drop off, figure out if there are confusing elements in the design, and make changes accordingly. This data-driven approach ensures that you’re fixing the right issues. 

Industry Stat: 57% of companies report significant improvements in product performance after adopting product analytics. 

Why Is Product Analytics Important? 

Product analytics is vital because it offers visibility on the gaps in your product offering, allowing you to identify where users struggle or disengage. By uncovering these gaps, you can make targeted improvements that enhance usability, engagement, and satisfaction.  

Real-world Scenario: Imagine discovering a key feature is underutilized because users don’t see its value. Product analytics highlights this issue and provides actionable insights, like where users drop off or what triggers frustration, empowering you to make targeted and systematic improvements. 

The Strategic Benefit: Once gaps are addressed, product analytics tracks how users interact with the changes, measuring success. This feedback loop refines your product, ensuring enhancements meet user needs—helping you understand what users like, dislike, and want more of. 

Key Benefits of Product Analytics:  

• Improved Decision-Making: Without data, you’re flying blind. Product analytics gives you the information needed to make smarter, faster decisions. Instead of guessing what users need, you’ll have concrete data on which features work, and which don’t. 

• Increased User Retention: Understanding user behavior allows you to personalize the user experience, keeping them engaged for longer. Users who feel like a product “understands” them are more likely to stick around and become loyal customers. 

• Enhanced Product Performance: By identifying problems early on—whether it’s a slow-loading page, a poorly designed feature, or a confusing flow—product analytics helps you proactively improve your product. You can ensure that performance remains optimal. 

Example: Say you’re monitoring a key feature in your app that users need to complete tasks, but you notice engagement is lower than expected.  
 
Product analytics can help you understand where users struggle. It may reveal that the feature is hard to find or difficult to use, allowing you to adjust and improve the experience. 

Product Analytics vs. Embedded Analytics 

While product analytics identifies opportunities for improvement, embedded analytics bridges the gap between user needs and your product’s functionality. 

• Product Analytics: Focuses on internal insights. It helps product managers and teams understand user behavior, uncover gaps, and measure the impact of changes. 

• Embedded Analytics: Elevates your product by providing users with actionable insights directly within your application. By embedding analytics, you create tools that empower users to make better decisions, driving engagement and value. 

How They Work Together

Product analytics highlights the need for solutions—such as improved data visualization or self-service capabilities—while embedded analytics fills those gaps. After implementation, product analytics tracks how users interact with the embedded features, giving you continuous feedback to refine and optimize. 

Real-World Example

If product analytics shows a high abandonment rate during a workflow, you might embed a dashboard or visualization that makes the workflow clearer. Product analytics then tracks how the embedded feature impacts user behavior, helping you measure ROI and iterate further. 

Comparison Insight: 90% of software companies are embedding analytics tools in their applications, significantly improving customer experience and product differentiation. 

How Embedded Analytics Transforms Product Analytics 

Embedded analytics doesn’t just fill gaps—it enhances the feedback loop that product analytics relies on. By incorporating analytics directly into your product, you provide users with tools that not only address their pain points but also generate richer data for analysis. This creates continuous improvement and refinement. 

Here’s how embedded analytics takes product analytics to the next level

• Closes the Gaps: Embedded analytics fills identified gaps by providing the features users need, like dashboards, customizable reports, or real-time insights. 

• Improves Data Quality: With embedded analytics, you capture detailed user behavior tied to new features, offering deeper insights for your product team. 

• Measures Success: Product analytics evaluates how well the embedded analytics features perform, tracking metrics like feature adoption, time spent in dashboards, or workflow completion rates. 

• Drives Continuous Optimization: Insights from embedded analytics enable iterative improvements to both the embedded features and the broader product. 

Example Workflow 

1. Product analytics identifies that users drop off during a reporting task. 

2. Embedded analytics is added, offering users a dynamic report builder within the app. 

3. Product analytics tracks the adoption of the report builder, revealing increased engagement and reduced drop-off. 

4. Additional enhancements are made based on user feedback and tracked metrics, improving overall satisfaction. 

By combining these two approaches, you can deliver meaningful solutions to users while ensuring your product continuously evolves to meet their needs. 

How to Use Product Analytics Tools Effectively 

The right product analytics tools go beyond surface-level metrics, offering actionable insights, automated reporting, and predictive capabilities. With features designed to simplify decision-making, you can focus less on analyzing and more on driving improvements to your product. 

How Product Analytics Tools Make a Difference: 

1. Real-Time Data: Access real-time data on how users interact with your product. You’ll know what’s working, what’s not, and where improvements are needed. 

2. Automated Insights: Reveal automates the collection and analysis of data, saving you hours of manual work and providing you with the insights you need to make quick decisions. 

3. Actionable Reports: Reveal’s tools generate actionable reports that highlight areas for improvement. These reports are designed for both product owners and non-technical teams to make data-driven decisions quickly. 

4. Predictive Analytics: Go beyond simple tracking—Reveal’s tools allow you to use predictive analytics to forecast user behavior and future trends. This gives product owners the foresight they need to stay ahead of the competition. 

Real-World Example: A product owner can use Reveal to track user interactions, and pinpoint where engagement uses those insights to redesign features or workflows that result in higher retention rates. 

Conclusion: Why Product Analytics Is a Must for 2025 

Product analytics is no longer an option—it’s a requirement for any company that wants to stay competitive in 2025. By using both product analytics and embedded analytics, product owners can gain deeper insights, improve user experiences, and drive business growth. 

To recap, product analytics helps you: 

• Enhance user engagement by personalizing experiences. 

• Improve product performance by fixing issues before they affect users. 

• Drive business growth through better decision-making. 

Don’t wait—start using product analytics today. Book a demo with Reveal and see how our powerful analytics tools can transform your product and drive growth. 

By embedding product analytics into your product strategy, you’ll have the data you need to not only optimize performance, but also ensure long-term success. Combined with embedded analytics, this approach will allow you to provide a seamless, data-driven experience for both your team and your users.