We are going through an era of digital transformation when technology landscapes are shifting. Data analytics, Big Data are some of the buzzwords that are in vogue. But what is leading to this new trend in data handling and data analysis? We are overwhelmed by massive amounts of structured and unstructured data (Petabytes or Exabytes) from various diverse sources, such as, social media networks, online ecommerce websites, online marketing, feedbacks from surveys, reviews of products, blog posts, and so on. IDC estimates that by 2020, business transactions on the internet by business-to-business and business-to-consumer will reach 450 billion per day. With online transactions and activities increasing rapidly, there is a humungous rise in the amount of data that needs to be effectively extracted, visualized, interpreted, and applied to increase the operational efficiency and marketing edge of a company. This process of identifying, extracting, processing, and integrating information from raw data to interpret customer behavior and buying pattern, and other trends and forecasts is broadly referred to as analytics. According to Wikipedia, analytics is the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data.
Benefits Of Analytics
Adaptive analytics helps a company to quickly adapt to customer behavior changes and anticipate a customer’s needs so that it can innovate and align its marketing strategies, design, production, and inventory accordingly. Adaptive analytics is a special breed of predictive analytics and if properly implemented it will help your business to stay fit, agile, and flexible to quickly adapt to future and changing needs of customers.
Google Analytics is one example of widely used analytics service on the internet which tracks and reports website traffic. Can you imagine what marketing dimension this service can add to your online business? As it integrated with AdWords, you can review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions, such as, sales, lead generation, number of views, comments, visitor’s location, visitor’s interest in your page, and so on. You can also use Google Analytics for e-commerce reporting to track sales activity and performance. The e-commerce reports show a site’s transactions, revenue, and other commerce-related metrics.
As organizations get ready for this new trend, they have employed analytics to help them decide what kind of data they should collect, and how this data should be analyzed to achieve their organizational goals. Though most of this data on the web is trending data or data in motion, the challenge is to quickly capture it, store it for historical or future use, and analyze the same to provide insights and relevant information through analytics. Statistical models, computer programming, and operation research are being applied for such analytics applications.
Conclusion
As the business scenario is becoming very competitive, to survive and sustain over long periods of time, companies need to adapt analytic process which is seen as a competitive differentiator for modern businesses. To make on-time, quick, informed decisions to succeed and survive, there is a pressing need for data analysis, real time indexing, data querying, storing, and extracting meaningful information and pattern from this huge volume of data.
