How Can Your Business Benefit from Analytics

Data analytics has taken the business community by storm recently. The rise of powerful computers as well as the amount and variety of data being generated has helped businesses of all types and sizes gather insight into many aspects of their business like never before. These days Google and Amazon can tell you what you will need or where you are likely to go for vacation even before you know it. When done right analytics can help your business grow sales and improve efficiency significantly.



There are various ways in which you can perform the analytics as shown by CAMO. A method called descriptive analytics is the most basic type that analyzes the data from the past to identify patterns. Other forms of analytics include predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics.

What is Descriptive Analytics?

The purpose of descriptive analytics is to analyze and summarize the data from the past and tell you what happened and why. Descriptive analytics is mostly based on standard aggregate functions like average, maximum and mode in databases that require nothing more than grade school math.

Descriptive analytics can be classified into three categories:

1. Event counters such as number of posts and followers on social media
2. Simple mathematical operations like average response time and average number of replies per post
3. Filtered analytics, such as average posts per week from the United Kingdom vs. average posts per week from Japan

Descriptive analytics can reveal insight into key performance indicators and they can be displayed in the report or dashboard view.

How do Businesses Use Descriptive Analytics?

Businesses use descriptive analytics to gain insight into number of activities they perform on a daily basis. The uses cases for descriptive analytics are numerous and varied.

For example, Wal-Mart mines terabytes of real-time data and petabytes of historical data every day to uncover patterns in sales, according to DeZyre. Wal-Mart analyzes online search keywords and customer interactions from different sources to look at certain actions. For instance, Wal-Mart examines what consumers buy in store and online, what’s trending on Twitter and how the World Series and weather affect buying patterns.