Every product decision should be centered around solving customer pain. Whether you are data-driven product manager who asks complex questions about user behavior every single day or a marketer who wants to keep track of how well their campaign is doing, analytical insights should be achievable for everyone. That’s how you start cultivating a company culture of data-driven decision making.

What role does analytics play in a business? What does it mean to be an analytics user in 2016? What do they find difficult or painful about analytics? These are some of the questions we sought to answer with our State of Analytics Survey. In order to do so, we surveyed about 150 people, ranging from C-level executives, VPs, directors, and product and marketing managers.

What follows are the key insights we derived from the responses we received — what we’re calling the “State of Analytics 2016.”

The analytics user profile

An overwhelming 86% of our respondents said that analytics was extremely important in driving business decisions. So it makes sense that the key users of analytics are not only data scientists; they are people who can make strategic business decisions. Of the analytics users that we surveyed, the majority described themselves as

• having a job title of manager or VP/director
• in product development or marketing.
• interested in asking questions about increasing engagement and retention.

How are analytics users getting insights?

Analytics users are choosing to buy out-of-the-box analytics tools instead of building their own analytics infrastructure. An overwhelming 90% only use out-of-the-box analytics tools, while 9% choose to use a combination of in-house and out-of-the-box analytics tools.

More and more people are switching from simple tools that are only useful for looking at daily active users or page views to using sophisticated tools that allow for event-based, behavioral analyses.

How Many Analytics Tools Are Being Used?

Businesses don’t just rely on 1 out-of-the-box analytics tool for their purposes. In fact, 60% of our respondents use two or more different analytics tools at one time.

This reveals that one out-of-the-box tool does not have all the functionality that analytics users want. The tools that currently exist are worthwhile alternatives to building an in-house infrastructure, but as of yet, there is no one solution that solves all the pain points of analytics users.

The main pain points experienced by analytics users are:

1. Cost
2. Complicated user interface
   Analytics users want a solution to be scalable, without having to pick and choose what they should track, but they also want their analytics platform to be simple and intuitive to use.

State of Analytics in 2016

A wide variety of people are using analytics across a single company, so analytics buyers are looking for products that are understandable and accessible for everyone.

The best analytics solutions are out-of-the-box tools that are as close to a one-stop shop as you can get. As of now, analytics users feel the need to use multiple analytics tools in parallel because they aren’t getting what they need from a single solution.

What does this all mean for analytics buyers? We’re already seeing a rise in the number of people who are using sophisticated behavioral solutions over basic tools like Google Analytics. In 2016, there will be a big push toward finding accessible, sophisticated tools that will help cultivate a company-wide, data-driven culture.