How to Use Analytics to Accelerate Business Growth?
Many organizations are establishing a Data Analytics team to reap the benefits of their key strategic asset i.e. data. The post explains how you can leverage the power of analytics to understand the end user and generate actionable insights.
Analytics is often associated with understanding why a particular event happened by analyzing historical data. It is more of a diagnostic approach to finding out the reasons for what happened in the past. With the advent of more advanced and sophisticated algorithms, analytics has graduated to a forward-looking approach. This prognostic approach learns the associations from past data to predict future trends and behavior. Such predictive foresight enables business leaders to calibrate their decisions and take the right course of action in line with such predictions.
Analytics could be used in multiple initiatives – there are multiple projects that could add business value but not everything can be picked at once. Time is of the essence hence the projects that align with the overall strategic business goal are prioritized first.
Business requirements and goals could focus on improving operational efficiencies, providing a better user experience by learning their preferences, introducing a new feature or product, etc.
Let us understand how analytics can be used to learn customer behavior with the help of an example. Search engine marketing requires competitors to bid for their advertisements to land an impression on the search result page. The caveat is to not bid consistently high for all the advertisements across all the regions (we will instead use a generalized form of regions called campaigns through the rest of the post). Typically, the business identifies certain campaigns as more ROI-generating ones than others, hence it would be more cost-effective to design an optimized bidding strategy for different campaigns.
The bid optimization algorithm improves sales as increased impressions lead to more potential clicks which in turn generate conversions. Besides, such an optimization tool brings cost savings by identifying customized bids per campaign instead of one static uniform bid across multiple campaigns. Such analytics projects have the potential to bring a significant positive nudge to the bottom line of the organization.
Drawing from the use case explained above, if an organization is able to bid in an effective and efficient manner, then they successfully pass the first stage of landing the impressions. The users click on these impressions and enter the web property of the organization’s ecosystem. The whole new journey of engaging the user starts from here. You have very little time to understand what the user is looking for and serve their requirements and preferences at blazing-fast speed. Amid the rapid rate of digitalization, it does not take a customer drop-off from one application and switch to another platform.
