Analytics for web applications

What are web application analytics?

Analytics for web applications help you understand how users experience your web app by aggregating qualitative and quantitative user behavior data as well as application performance metrics. This could include how users enter and exit your app, the actions they take on various pages, conversion rates, ideal paths, feature engagement, and any problems they encounter on their journey. Product teams can use this data to discover opportunities to improve business outcomes.

Ultimately, analytics for web applications can help teams identify trends in user behavior to optimize performance. You can leverage this information to better drive KPIs like conversion and engagement, identify bugs in your web app before customers do, and resolve user-reported problems faster than ever before.

The problem with analytics for web applications

There are many different KPIs to consider when analyzing your web application’s performance. First off, how do you balance agility against capturing an overwhelming amount of data you’ll need to sort through?

If you’re using a tool that requires manual tagging of the events you want to monitor, you have to know exactly what you want to track, coordinate with Engineering resources to implement tagging, then wait to capture a large enough dataset before you can start analyzing it. On the other hand, tools that autocapture everything produce a massive amount of data to sort through, making it hard to determine which issues to prioritize.

Agility is important. Critical delays — like waiting for an engineering sprint where they can tag some events, then another 30 days to start measuring a potential issue — can cause vital issues to go unnoticed for weeks and lead to lost revenue or negative user sentiment. But you also need the tools to help you sort and prioritize the data that comes with autocapture.

When you do find issues, how do you prioritize? Some problems may have little to no effect on your users or on your business goals, while others may have an outsized impact on critical user flows.

Discerning between the two is the difference between wasting finite resources on fixing an issue that doesn’t really matter and efficiently improving your business. Without the necessary context regarding user or business severity, it’s difficult to find those high-impact fixes that will give you the biggest benefit.

Additionally, building better digital experiences requires cross-team collaboration and communication. These concerted efforts can include collecting and analyzing customer feedback, tracking critical business metrics, and monitoring alerts, errors, and performance issues. You need one source of truth across engineering, product management, UX design, and marketing teams so stakeholders can get the information they need and share it with each other.

With so much information to collect and analyze, it’s important to find the right tool that will help you surface the most relevant data automatically, collaborate effectively across teams, and ensure great digital experiences for your users.

How do I track analytics for web applications?

There’s an abundance of tools available that collect analytics for web applications, but most stay at the aggregate level, capturing only quantifiable actions and events. LogRocket captures these same analytics, displaying them with common visualization structures including charts, dashboards, conversion funnels, heatmaps, path analyses, and more.

Beyond this quantified user behavior, LogRocket integrates session replay so you can see exactly what users experienced to understand what drove their behavior. Additionally, error tracking and machine learning allow you to catch issues before users report them and understand how they affect your key business metrics.

• Analyze data at both big-picture and granular levels
• Combine qualitative and quantitative analysis to inform business decisions
• Monitor real user sessions to improve UX
• Get alerted when high-impact errors occur or key metrics drop
• Understand and solve issues at their source
• Streamline internal communications

This means the right people on your team get alerted to the most impactful issues affecting users of your website or app so you can fix them before they become an issue to your KPIs.

Focus on the most impactful issues your users face and the metrics that matter most to you so you can work more confidently on improving your web and mobile product experience.

Why LogRocket?

Not all analytics tools for web applications are made alike. Many tools are limited in their technical telemetry and can end up adding to the noise instead of cutting through it. Others lack the qualitative information to really understand what the user experienced.

For example, tools like Google Analytics are popular for being free and collecting large amounts of data. But this lack of a “sticker price” comes at the cost of your valuable time and resources.

You’ll need to set up tracking and sort through potentially missing, skewed, or unnecessary information to find any actionable insights. Even then, it can be a challenge to get a clear idea of what to focus on, why, and how — and forget about using it to dig into an issue’s root cause or understand what your users actually experienced.

LogRocket makes it easy to see exactly how your users experience your web and mobile apps, as well as the “why” behind any issues. Applying machine learning to these patterns allows LogRocket to detect problems before your users report them so you can ship a fix before it affects your business.

• Optimize conversion rate and adoption with Analytics and Insights
• Solve user-reported issues with session replay
• Find issues faster with machine learning models that surface the most impactful problems affecting your users

Understand and quantify the specific issues that are impacting your goals, watch user sessions to see how those issues affect your app’s UX, then route alerts and errors to the right person or team for a fix.

LogRocket also allows different teams to collaborate on analytics for web and mobile applications, improving efficiency and producing better outcomes. Engineers, support staff, product managers, designers, and marketers can all use LogRocket as their source of truth for prioritizing and addressing both issues and opportunities.

Quickly identify, understand, and resolve problems with your web and mobile apps at their source. Get a complete picture of what’s happening, prioritize and communicate more effectively, and ensure the ideal digital experience for every user.

Try it yourself for free!

Install LogRocket in under 3 minutes. Get free access to all features for 14 days. Cancel at any time.