INDUSTRY REPORT
Executive Summary
Software usage analytics—the process of tracking and analyzing how users engage with software—provides actionable insights that help software suppliers make informed decisions about their products. Clarity into how customers use products can help software producers build robust solutions that lead to user engagement and ongoing customer relationships.
This report evaluates the trends in how software producers collect and analyze software usage data. It also identifies areas of potential improvement, including the importance of initiating usage data collection and automating collection efforts through purpose-built commercial entitlement management solutions. It builds on findings presented in the Revenera Monetization Monitor: Software Monetization Models and Strategies 2022, which focused on software monetization and deployment models.
As suppliers offer hybrid monetization approaches, relying on software usage analytics is particularly important. It helps drive informed pricing decisions for usage-based monetization models, such as consumption and metered.
By 2024, 80% of software suppliers will collect software usage data.
In a trend away from time-consuming processes, reliance on manual interventions dropped by nearly 10 percentage points, from 44% in 2021 to 35% in 2022.
Only about ¼ (26%) of respondents indicate that their organization can currently gather product usage data “very well,” indicating room for improvement for the majority of software suppliers.
Suppliers that collect usage data have greater visibility into how customers use their products. For the essential metric of whether suppliers can see if customers are using their product at all, 52% of those who collect usage data have this visibility, while the number drops to 25% among those that don’t collect usage data.
Table of Contents
The Revenera Monetization Monitor 2022 Series
This report is part of an annual series, first published in 2019, focusing on software usage analytics. The first report in the Revenera Monetization Monitor 2022 series addressed software monetization models and strategies; the next will address software compliance & piracy. All reports are based on 261 responses to a global survey conducted by Revenera from mid-April through mid-July 2022.
Software Suppliers’ Interest in Product Usage Data
Software Usage Data Collection Trends
More important than just collecting usage data is the capability to visualize, analyze, and report on it efficiently, without requiring manual processes or engineering work. Only about ¼ (26%) can currently collect usage data very well, while 9% have no plans to capture this data, indicating room for improvement.
Please rate your organization's ability to gather product usage data
18%
of respondents plan to gather software product usage data in the next 12–24 months—
double the rate (9%) that planned to do so in 2021, indicating growing interest in the practice.
SOFTWARE USAGE ANALYTICS
Software usage analytics is the process of tracking and analyzing how users engage with software. It provides:
- Tracking, which usually happens via a call-home system that collects raw data about user actions and computing environments,
- Analysis, through visualization dashboards that show data, identify trends, user behavior, differentiators across user segments, etc., and
- Actionable insights, facilitating context-relevant engagement with the software.
USAGE DATA
Usage data is valuable for all monetization models. It helps product management, marketing, software engineering, sales, customer success, compliance, and senior management teams. Uses include feature prioritization or roadmap development, UI/UX design, beta testing, deprecating features, pricing decisions, software version decisions, and piracy tracking.
