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Product analytics captures everything users do in your product and turns that data into actionable insights. With PostHog, you get automatic event tracking (autocapture), custom events, and multiple visualization types to analyze user behavior.

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How it works

Product analytics starts with event collection. PostHog captures user interactions automatically and lets you define custom events for specific business metrics.

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Autocapture

Autocapture tracks user interactions without manual instrumentation. Install the PostHog snippet and it automatically collects:
  • Page views and navigation
  • Button and link clicks
  • Form submissions and inputs
  • Custom data attributes
Autocapture works on web applications out of the box. For mobile apps, you’ll need to instrument events manually using the SDK.

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Custom events

Track specific business events with custom instrumentation: 
// Track a custom event
posthog.capture('user_signed_up', {
  plan: 'pro',
  source: 'pricing_page',
  monthly_value: 99
})

// Track with user properties
posthog.capture('checkout_completed', {
  revenue: 149.99,
  items: 3,
  payment_method: 'card'
})

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Insight types

Product analytics offers six visualization types to analyze your data from different angles.
1

Trends

Track metrics over time. See how events, user actions, or properties change across days, weeks, or months.Use cases: Daily active users, feature adoption rates, conversion metrics
2

Funnels

Analyze conversion through multi-step processes. Identify where users drop off in signup flows, checkout processes, or onboarding sequences.Use cases: Signup conversion, checkout abandonment, feature adoption funnels
3

Retention

Measure how many users return after their first visit. Understand which features drive long-term engagement.Use cases: Weekly retention cohorts, feature stickiness, churn analysis
4

User paths

Visualize the actual routes users take through your product. Discover unexpected navigation patterns.Use cases: Navigation analysis, feature discovery patterns, exit paths
5

Stickiness

See how frequently users perform actions. Identify your power users and engagement patterns.Use cases: Feature engagement frequency, power user identification, habit formation
6

Lifecycle

Track users across new, returning, resurrecting, and dormant states to understand user health.Use cases: User health monitoring, reactivation opportunities, growth composition

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Creating insights

Build insights from the insights page or directly from the new menu:
  1. Navigate to Product analytics in the sidebar
  2. Click New insight
  3. Select your insight type (Trends, Funnels, etc.)
  4. Configure events, filters, and breakdowns
  5. Save to a dashboard

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Event definitions

Manage your event schema from the event definitions page:
  • Verify events: Mark events as verified to indicate they’re correctly tracked
  • Add descriptions: Document what each event represents
  • Set tags: Organize events by feature area or team
  • View volume: See how frequently events fire
Event definitions are shared across your team. Changes apply to everyone in the project.

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Filtering and breakdowns

Refine insights with filters and breakdowns:

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Property filters

Filter events based on properties: 
// Events automatically include properties you can filter on
posthog.capture('button_clicked', {
  button_name: 'Sign up',
  page: '/pricing',
  user_plan: 'free'
})
In the UI, filter to show only events where user_plan = 'free' or page contains '/pricing'.

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Breakdowns

Break down metrics by property values to compare segments:
  • Break down conversion by traffic source
  • Compare retention across user plans
  • Analyze feature usage by device type

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Common workflows

Track feature adoption

Create a Trends insight showing the event for your new feature over time. Break down by user plan to see which segments adopt fastest.

Analyze signup conversion

Build a Funnel from landing page view → signup click → account created → first action. Identify the biggest drop-off point.

Measure retention

Create a Retention insight with your activation event. See what percentage of users return each week after first use.

Find power users

Use Stickiness to see how many days per week users perform key actions. Users in the 5-7 day range are your power users.

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Integration with other products

Product analytics connects with PostHog’s other tools:
  • Session replay: Click any data point to watch actual user sessions
  • Feature flags: Create flags based on user properties or behaviors
  • Experiments: Use insights as experiment metrics
  • Surveys: Target surveys based on user actions

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Best practices

Let autocapture handle basic interactions while you focus on tracking business-specific events. Add custom events for conversion actions, revenue events, and key features.
Adopt a naming pattern like object_action (e.g., project_created, file_uploaded) to keep events organized as you scale.
Include context like plan tier, feature area, or dollar amounts. This makes filtering and analysis more powerful without creating dozens of events.
Build focused dashboards for product, growth, and leadership teams. Each team cares about different metrics.

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