What is data analytics?

Shelley Haggert
By Shelley Haggert November 15, 2019 12:44

By Jayakar Vadla

Student, Data Analytics

Data is everywhere you use social media. Facebook collects data from every click you make on their site, Walmart collects data from its customers, airlines collect your data, every industry – you name it – collects data.

We know data is everywhere, lots of it. But what do we do with it?

In the past we had data but we didn’t have the technology to be able to use the data and gain insights. Now that we have the technologies and hardware to be able to store huge amounts of data we can use the results to get those “insights.”

That’s the key word: insights.

Data analytics is all about finding the insights in the data. It’s about finding the patterns in the data so that we can predict future sales for a company, ways to reduce costs, improve productivity and business gains and understand customers better.

Data is collected and categorized to identify the behaviours and patterns of subjects.

Let’s take a deeper dive.

1) Data helps with improved decision making, eliminating the guesswork. With the current data analytics technologies you can continuously collect and analyze new data to update your understanding as conditions change.

2) Data helps with more effective marketing because you understand your customer better and that, in turn, helps you with better customer service.

Here’s an example of how data works:

Let’s say you’re a marketer who’s running an online ad campaign to promote a new smartphone. You might start by targeting the ad to people who bought the previous version of the phone in question. As your campaign runs, you use data analytics techniques to sift through the data generated when people clicked on the ad. By examining data about these users’ interests, perhaps you discover many of them are interested in photography. Perhaps this is because your new phone has a better camera than the previous model. Using this information, you could fine-tune your ad to focus on users who bought the previous phone and like photography. You could also find new audiences of people who didn’t buy the older phone but are interested in photography.

 

 

 

Shelley Haggert
By Shelley Haggert November 15, 2019 12:44

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