What is digital analytics? A comprehensive guide for 2025 (and beyond)

Great digital experiences feel effortless, but there’s a huge amount of customer insight needed to really get it right. And with so many potential data points and sources, it can be hard to know where to start or how to set your team up for success.

Enter digital analytics: the most powerful way to understand your users, make data-driven decisions, and prioritize your resources to have maximum business impact. 

In this guide, we cover everything you need to know about digital analytics: what it is, why it matters to your business, and actionable ways to start using it today to drive engagement, conversions, and revenue.

Key insights

• Digital analytics is no longer just for specialists—it’s a necessity for every team. Democratizing your data with a centralized, easy-to-use platform puts the power of customer insights in everyone’s hands, enabling teams to work quickly to improve the user experience.

• AI-powered data analysis capabilities are a game-changer for experts and data newbies alike, removing hours of admin, reducing time to insight, and relieving strain on your engineering teams

• A successful digital analytics strategy needs to combine quantitative and qualitative data, incorporating inputs from a range of sources to help you truly empathize with customer needs and preferences

What is digital analytics?

Digital analytics is the process of collecting and analyzing data from your website, app, product, and other digital touchpoints (like social media, email, and marketing campaigns) to understand user behavior and optimize performance. 

This data comes from a range of sources and tools, including

• Behavior analytics tools like session replays, heatmaps, and journey analysis that reveal how users act on your site or product

• Customer interactions with your social media platforms or support channels

• Website traffic data like page views, bounce rates, time spent on page, and drop-offs

• Digital experience monitoring like error analysis and speed monitoring 

• Product data like usage and engagement metrics

• Voice-of-customer (VoC) feedback from online surveys and interviews

• Mobile analytics data from your app

Digital analytics is used by product, marketing, user experience (UX), design, and ecommerce teams to turn customer behavior into insights that fuel informed decision-making and improve the customer experience (CX).

Digital analytics vs. data analytics vs. web analytics: what’s the difference?

Digital analytics, data analytics, and web analytics share some similarities, but there are key differences in terms of scope:

• Data analytics is the overall discipline of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data from any source—digital or otherwise

• Digital analytics is a subset of data analytics that explores data from a range of digital sources and experiences, such as customer behavior within your product, app, website, or social media

• Web analytics is a subset of digital analytics that focuses specifically on data from your website or web-based application  

10 ways digital analytics helps teams achieve key business goals

Digital analytics powers everything from your marketing efforts to product improvements. Here are 10 ways teams use digital analytics to enhance CX and drive real business results.

Increase user engagement

Use digital experience analytics to understand how users really engage with your site or product and make data-driven improvements that increase engagement, conversions, and retention.

For example:

1. Learn what users are looking for

Collect data from heatmaps to discover which elements of your site or product capture attention and resonate with your target audience—and which parts get missed or overlooked. Use your learnings to redesign and refine key pages to boost engagement and conversion rates.

2. Uncover high-impact user journeys

Analyze user journeys to understand which paths result in conversions and which ones lead to dead ends. Remove blockers, address drop-offs, and work backward from your most successful journeys to encourage more users to take these paths.

3. Watch user behavior to personalize experiences

Watch session replays to compare how different user segments behave, then create personalized experiences based on their needs. For example, if users from a certain segment show high engagement with sections about your product’s AI functionality, you could create dedicated landing pages or content marketing material to highlight these capabilities further.

💡 Pro tip: use AI-powered Session Replay Summaries in Contentsquare to get in-depth insights from one or multiple session replays without spending hours watching each one. Contentsquare’s AI, Sense, takes the heavy lifting out of data analysis, delivering key insights, potential issues, and behavioral trends in a few clicks, all with time-stamped links to the most critical moments.

Identify friction points

Digital analytics tools like Contentsquare’s Experience Monitoring reveal friction and user pain points that negatively impact your users and cause high bounce rates—or even churn. With the right tools, you can quickly find and fix errors and prioritize them based on business impact, helping you maximize your return on investment (ROI).

For example:

4. Monitor trends in CX and user behavior

Use AI alerts to quickly and effortlessly stay on top of key performance indicators (KPIs). Set alerts to get informed about deviations or anomalies in important digital analytics metrics like

• Conversion rate

• The number of users who experienced errors

• Bounce rates

• Page views

• Device- or segment-specific behaviors

Then, get notifications directly via email or in your Slack workspace so you can immediately respond to issues before they become problems.

Use Contentsquare’s AI alerts to track the KPIs that matter most to your business

5. Quantify and prioritize frustration factors

Use an AI-based frustration score to find moments of friction on your site and take action accordingly. 

Contentsquare’s frustration score feature considers a range of factors—such as rage clicks, multiple field submissions, JavaScript and API errors, and performance issues—then assigns each page, page set, or session a score from 0–100. This feature uses AI to objectively rank how frustrating these pages or sessions are for users, so you can easily prioritize the most impactful fixes.

Want to drill in a little deeper? Filter session replays by frustration score and use Session Replay Summaries to quickly contextualize how frustration impacts the digital experience. Watch and share the most relevant moments for valuable insights on how to improve the customer journey.

Build products people love

Use product analytics—another subset of digital analytics that focuses on how users interact with your product from beginning to end—to understand engagement, including which features they use (or don’t), barriers to adoption, and what keeps them coming back.

For example:

6. Improve feature adoption

Track the adoption of your newly released feature across different plan types, user segments, or devices to understand how it’s performing—and what you can do to increase usage. Make data-driven optimizations, like finding and fixing UX errors that cause users to drop off, or launch re-engagement campaigns to specific user segments to help them realize value.

7. Tailor onboarding by audience

Track onboarding by user segment and monitor long-term usage data to understand which flows lead to long-term success—for customers and your business. Identify where different user types need help, and zoom in with session replays to see exactly how you can support them. Then, create additional content to proactively address blockers, or use A/B testing to trial new onboarding flows based on specific use cases to help more users realize value, faster.

💡Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s AI copilot, Chat with Sense, to get in-depth analyses instantly. Ask questions and let Sense analyze all digital data across key Contentsquare capabilities to provide clear, comprehensive answers illustrated with relevant data visualizations. Enhance your analysis with Sense’s suggested follow-up questions or click ‘Explain my approach’ to get a detailed breakdown of how it reached its conclusions. 

Deeply understand your audience

Qualitative data analytics uses VoC tools to get rich user feedback and connects these insights with your other data points to provide a fuller picture of the overall customer experience.

For example:

8. Capture user feedback with surveys

Launch surveys to hear directly from your customers. Choose from Contentsquare’s pre-made template library or let Sense quickly generate one for you based on your research goal (like ‘Why are users abandoning the checkout?’). Remove hours of manual research by using AI to analyze the results and produce summary reports that give you main focus areas, relevant quotes, and a suggested action plan for next steps. 

9. Test prototypes before launch

Run user tests to see how people intuitively navigate your prototype or website and get their candid feedback. Use Contentsquare to launch user tests at scale and across time zones: set a task or goal, record participants completing it in their own time, and get their valuable insights about the process, all without a researcher.

10. Get deeper insights with interviews

Conduct user interviews with existing customers or members of your ideal customer profile (ICP) to get detailed feedback about their experiences, needs, and pain points. You can also follow up on specific survey responses by inviting that user to an interview to learn more. Contentsquare’s Interviews capability streamlines scheduling and recruitment from a diverse pool of over 200,000 participants, and automatically gives you AI-generated transcripts post-interview to make analysis a breeze. 

How to choose the right digital analytics tool

When choosing a digital analytics tool, look for one that ticks these boxes:

✅ Connected and all-in-one

An all-in-one platform like Contentsquare connects the dots between key data points, giving you a comprehensive overview of the user experience, enabling more accurate, detailed analysis across the entire customer journey.

✅ AI-powered

Cutting-edge AI capabilities empower every team to get more from digital analytics data, massively reducing labor-intensive admin and time to insight. This helps you make decisions faster, work quickly to make optimizations, and prioritize enhancements that boost your business.

✅ Automatic data capture

Remove tedious tagging and manual setup with automatic data capture from day one. Get complete, retroactive data so you always have the information you need—even if your goals or events change.

FAQs about digital analytics