Why You Need a Full-Stack Analytics Solution

Conventional out-of-the-box analytics solutions — like Google Analytics — are mainstays for the early stages of many companies. They’re a cheap, quick way to get some analytics capability into your company. And when you’re only just starting to figure out what your product even is,they seem like a reasonable way to peek under the data hood without stretching your resources.

But then you start asking more complex questions, like:

It’s at this point that you start to need more than what your “easy” out-of-box solution is giving you if you want to move forward with building your product and your company.

Building your own analytics hits directly at the big problem with these analytics solutions: they aren’t built to give you complex, real-time information about your users’ (or any other type of actor’s) behavior.

They can’t be because conventional out-of-the-box analytics solutions only address parts of the analytics pipeline. In order to achieve maximum interoperability and market size, they sell you justthe dashboard or justthe ability to A/B test.

Trying to build the right mix of data collection and accessible analysis can lead to supplementing out-of-the-box tools with add-ons and apps that work in tandem with one another. But with a patchwork of off-the-shelf solutions, you end up with:

…which makes building your own analytics seem like a good option-one that’s flexible, with reliable data, and completely customizable solutions for your business.

Unless you’re Facebook or Google, you’ll quickly realize it’s pretty much insane to build your own analytics. Without Google-esque resources, you simply can’t sustain costs or maintenance.

To pile on, it’s also difficult to get the backend system in place while also making something that’s easy for people to use. So even if you’re collecting and storing your data, you have to spend even more time and energy building a visual interface that lets everyone harness that data.

As tempting as the promise of building in-house analytics seems, it’s not feasible. And it probably wasn’t what you should have been considering, anyway — especially not when there’s a better, easier option out there.

In general, the idea of something being full-stack is roughly the same as the idea of something being vertically integrated: You create and control all parts of your process from beginning to end.