Many startup founders often find themselves confused over product and digital marketing analysts. And it’s understandable.

After all, both of these professionals analyze product data to derive actionable insights. And both of their jobs’ end goal is to increase revenue. However, the way these two professionals achieve this goal is fundamentally different.

Let’s see what makes product analysts and digital marketing analysts different.

What Does a Product Analyst Do?

Product analysts generate and analyze data on customer experience after the consumers have bought a product.

A product analyst needs to collect data on how customers interact with your company’s product. This includes collecting multiple metrics like user trends, bounce rates, the most popular, friction points, and more.

After that, the product analyst will have to analyze the collected data to find out the specific strengths and weaknesses of the launched products.

Then they will share the data with the relevant stakeholders so they can refine the product further to improve customer experience.

For example, product analysts often use trend analysis to help the product team determine which features the customers liked the most and the least using historical data.

In short, product analysts use solid, measurable metrics to determine how customers engage with different products, instead of relying on vague hunches.

Their work can reduce churns, identify potential product upgrade opportunities, and improve customer retention rates.

What Does a Digital Marketing Analyst Do?

A digital marketing analyst collects and analyzes digital marketing data and uses them to understand pre-purchase consumer behavior.

These professionals deal with a broad range of activities and work with multiple metrics to understand the factors that influence customers’ buying habits. Some of these metrics include:

• Leading traffic sources
• Page views
• Bounce rate
• Website or app visit count
• Pages the customers visit the most
• The least visited web pages
• Return on investment
• The average cost of acquisition

…And many more!

Digital marketing analysts use metrics and other data to make future predictions and suggest actionable ideas that can improve the company’s ROI.

In a nutshell, these experts use past marketing data to refine digital marketing campaigns to generate high-quality leads and increase sales.

The Difference Between a Product and Digital Marketing Analyst

Product Analysts Focus on Product Improvement While Digital Marketing Analysts Focus on Improving Marketing Campaigns

A product analyst’s job officially starts when leads convert into customers after buying products or services. Your goal here is to provide the best possible customer experience.

You can do this by analyzing customer feedback data to improve product quality and features, identify relevant trends, and resolve problem areas.

These data and their application will help businesses boost customer retention rates in the long run.

On the other hand, digital marketing analysts quantify and analyze campaigns and events that led to product purchases. 

Here, you need to crunch pre-purchase data to identify the best marketing channels, devise content to appeal to relevant audiences, and uncover the best opportunities to increase sales.

Your goal is to improve digital marketing campaigns so you can:

• Drive quality traffic to your site
• Turn as many people as possible into leads
• Convert as many leads as possible into paying customer

Product Analysts Try to Increase Product Engagement While Digital Marketing Analysts Try to Increase ROI

Even though both professionals’ ultimate goal is to use data analytics to increase revenue, the ways they do it are different.

Product analysts will try to discover the aspects that improve product engagement to increase revenue.

For example, if you find customers appreciating a particular product feature a lot, you need to prioritize that feature and find ways to optimize it.

Meanwhile, digital marketing analysts will try to increase business revenue by:

• Eliminating campaign inefficiencies
• Spending more marketing budget on the high-performing channels
• Identifying and slashing off marketing channels with poor performance

Your goal is to cut loose ends and maximize ROI, making every penny count to increase revenue.

They Use Different Analytical Tools

Product analysts use tools that make it easier for them to understand:

• How customers engage with the products
• How long do they use your services and products each day
• What product features do customers use the most

…And many more.

The popular tools that help them with product analysis are Pendo, Glassbox, Mixpanel, Heap, etc. A professional who excels in the product analyst skills test knows how to make the best use of these tools.

Meanwhile, digital marketing analysts use tools that help them extract campaign data and organize crucial marketing metrics. For example, Google Analytics helps them keep an eye on page views, average visit duration, bounce rate, and other site metrics.

SEO tools like Semrush and Ahrefs can organize and reveal SEO marketing data. Crazy Egg uses the warm-and-cool color spectrum feature to show which section in your site received the most attention from the leads.

Apart from the tools mentioned above, digital marketing analysts also use Hotjar, Hubspot, BuzzSumo, Cyfe, KissMetrics, etc.

Conclusion

Apart from these three key points, product and digital marketing analysts have many other subtle differences. Just remember, a product analyst’s job starts after product purchase while a digital marketing analyst collects and analyzes the pre-purchase campaign data.

The main goal of both of these professionals is still to increase their companies’ revenue, albeit they do things differently.