UX Glossary | A
Analytics report
Also: Web analytics report, Behavioural analytics report
A summary of how people actually behave in a live product: the paths they take, what they engage with and where they drop off.
An analytics report takes the raw event data from a live product and turns it into a short account of what people do. Which pages they reach, which paths they follow, which features they touch, and the points where they leave. It describes behaviour, not opinion.
What it is for
The report earns its place by pointing at where to look. If 60 percent of people who start a checkout never finish, you do not yet know why, but you know which step to put under a microscope. That is the real job: it generates questions for usability testing and interviews, and it checks whether a redesign moved the numbers it was meant to move.
Analytics report versus dashboard
A dashboard is a live view you glance at. A report is a considered document with a point of view: here is what we saw over this period, here is what we think it means, here is what we suggest. The first is monitoring, the second is interpretation.
What goes wrong
The common mistake is reporting numbers without a story. Fifteen charts of sessions and bounce rate leave the reader to do the analysis, and they will not. Pick the two or three findings that matter, state each as a sentence, and put the chart underneath as evidence.
The other trap is treating the numbers as an explanation. Analytics tells you what happened and never why. Pair it with user research before you act on a guess about motive.