The internet is not just a vast knowledge hoard for people, but also one of the most effective marketing tools for companies. With traditional advertising channels, such as newspapers, TVs, radio, billboards, and magazines, it is almost impossible to gauge how many people saw a particular promotional feature. On the contrary, websites and computer and mobile applications make it extremely easy for companies to track the number of visitors (web traffic), user activity, the time they spend on a particular feature or page, how many times a specific button has been clicked, and many more such aspects.

The most important factor propelling the adoption of such solutions is perhaps the increasing internet penetration around the world. Since 2006, there has been an abrupt jump in the percentage of the world’s population using the internet, from 17.483% to 49.723% in 2017, as per the World Bank. Developed countries, such as the U.S., Singapore, and Australia, as well as emerging economies, including India and China, have seen a rapid rise in the number of internet users in the last 10–15 years. This has led to an explosion in the number of people visiting different websites, which are an important part of marketing for most companies, nowadays.

Similarly, the sale of smartphones is also on a constant surge, as the manufacturing of such consumer electronics in developing countries, such as China, South Korea, India, and Taiwan, is making them more affordable for the masses, especially in these very countries. Additionally, with a rise in the disposable income of the people here, they have got the freedom to spend on such products, which they wouldn’t even think of buying a decade ago. The escalating number of smartphone users is, in turn, leading to an increase in the download rate of various mobile applications, which serve the same marketing purposes as websites.

This is why between mobile- and web-based product analytics solutions, though web-based software has been in higher demand up till now, that compatible with mobile platforms is predicted to rapidly become preferred by businesses in the coming years. Both these types of solutions can be deployed on the firm’s own servers or on the cloud. Of these, cloud-based software has witnessed wider adoption, as cloud offers users the flexibility to scale the data storage capacity up or down, as per use. Moreover, cloud-based solutions are accessible from any internet-enabled device, and they also result in a reduction in IT expenditure.

Around the world, the most powerful engine of growth for the product analytics market, among the media & entertainment, banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI), automotive, manufacturing, energy & utilities, healthcare, retail, and government sectors, has been the BFSI sector. This is credited to the rapid adoption of digital banking platforms by customers, demand for a better experience by users, and rising preference for personalized banking services. In the era of swift digitization, banking and financial organizations are not only using product analytics to track the user activity, but also for engaging with their customers in a better way.

Therefore, with the increasing desktop and mobile web traffic, the usage of product analytics software will grow as well.