Business Analytics

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Business analytics is the art and science of discovering insight – by using sophisticated mathematical, statistical, machine learning, and network science methods along with a variety of data and expert knowledge – to support better and faster/timely decision-making.*

The biggest barrier to being data-driven is lack of business executive support/corporate strategy (42%), and the most frequently mentioned step managers took to develop a data-driven culture is to make the case to corporate leadership to invest in Business Intelligence and Analytics (57%). *

Studies emphasise the advantages of Business Analytics maturity, as a high level of maturity positively correlates with positive BA outcomes for the organisation. It has also been shown that analytic maturity positively correlates with improved managerial decision-making.*

Firms achieving a high level of digital maturity have greater revenue generation, greater market valuation, and roughly 25% higher profitability than firms with a low level of maturity.* In particular, companies in the top third of their industry in the use of data-driven decision making were, on average, 5% more productive and 6% more profitable than their competitors.*

However, despite such evidence and other research that points to the benefit of deploying analytics solutions, little is known about how these benefits are generated, how marketers use the information from analytics dashboards, and how customers change their behavior after a marketer deploys an analytics solution.*

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Analytics solutions are often categorized into one of four categories:

(i) Descriptive Analytics (What happened?)

(ii) Diagnostic Analytics (Why did it happen?)

(iii) Predictive Analytics (What will happen next?)

(iv) Prescriptive Analytics (What should be done about it?)

The term “advanced analytics” refers to both predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics that aim to provide foresight. The emerging term autonomous analytics refers to a class of analytics that requires little to no human intervention and that recommends an optimal course of action in real-time.*

Most firms that adopt these solutions often deploy them first in the sales and marketing functions of the organization, and among marketing practitioners, descriptive analytics and simple key performance indicators (KPI) dashboards are the most popular choice.*

There are alternative business analytics technologies that can be considered—such as web analytics, which provides an understanding of how visitors interact with the features of a company’s website—or which landing pages’ are likely to encourage visitors seeking a product/service. Mobile analytics is yet another fecund area that allows exploring applications of analytics on mobile devices.*

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Analytical tools (such as Google Analytics and Qliksense) have improved up to the point that there are little differences between the tools. Consequently, which specific analytical tool a firm chooses to conduct its data analysis is insignificant to assess its business analytics maturity.*

Research shows that 93% of online shopping starts from websites search. Therefore, to capture the online marketplace places the advertisement provider needs to know the right place to set up their ad so that most of the website users can see their ad.*

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The findings revealed that e-commerce companies using Google Analytics achieve higher sales numbers. E-retailing companies that use Google Analytics can evaluate the data they collected from this program to get to know their customers better and achieve success in their marketing strategies.*

Business analytics, in its nascent stage of use, has the potential to greatly improve outcomes, decision-making quality, and cost-efficiency of businesses and it is only recently that information technology with the desired level of sophistication and advancement has become available. The discipline of analytics/data science continues to mature at a rapid pace as businesses embrace its potential.*