With 2024 right around the corner, there’s no better time to start to improve your data analytics and tracking. Data analytics can be used for almost anything you can think of.
Every company you can imagine, even before the increase in popularity, was reviewing analytics to improve their business. For example, a store hosting and advertising a massive sale will probably have more purchases to record than on a normal day.
How to Understand What Worked In Your Analytics and Tracking?
Understanding what worked about that sale will help the company develop for further success. All these factors would be carefully assessed to build new strategies into the business’ regular model.
Another example could be found in two companies partnering to release merchandise based on an upcoming film/game.
Do you need to rely on analytics?
They would rely on analytics to understand when to release the merchandise in line with the media, as they have a much shorter production cycle. By studying the data of their customers, they could figure out if they should release the merchandise before or after the media itself, where to make it purchasable, and if there are any variants or limited editions.
The performance of that merchandise would then have its own data analysed to see what sold well, what didn’t sell, if there were any peaks in times or days for sales, etc.
The examples covered may focus on physical sales, but there is data to be studied for literally any and every business there is.
In recent years, Data Analytics has been a core element of expanding and improving businesses both big and small, no matter their function. So much so that there is a vast array of specific tools and programs to track analytics across your company’s website!
Some of the accessible tools include but are not limited to:
Google Analytics, Oakland Group, and Segment.
These helpful tools can accurately track data and activity across your website of choice. This data includes which pages customers may be entering the website from the most frequently, which pages they stay on for the longest, and which pages tend to see the most people leaving. Not just customer activity can be tracked, but also company activity! This could help reduce unnecessary costs when observing where money is going and what the benefit of that spending is.
Observing these sorts of trends is a helpful way to see what’s going well and what maybe isn’t going so well with the website. It means finding what needs to be improved on the website and putting an appropriate strategy in place for enhancement.
So how do you formulate a good strategy?
It doesn’t start with the graphs, the tracking, or the tools.
It starts with the five P’s. Five words.
Purpose
Why is tracking data essential? What might it improve? Will it aid improvements of the business? Is it worth all the resources required?
People
Who is involved? Do you have the right team for the job? Ideally having a data expert, domain expert, and data testers onboard. As well as properly involving third parties such as Stakeholders, Product Sponsors in situations where they are present.
Processes
Which of the two process types do you need to follow- Organisational or technical?
Organisational processes rely more on the people. Involving third parties and collaborators in the plan, as well as frequent progress reports and marketing to inform Stakeholders of progress.
Technical processes are a more inside job for the experts. Which business process will be supported by the collected data and IT? With data integration – ETL or ELT? Which data analysis and data science strategies will be employed?
There are also considerations to take, such as how long will the analysis take place? Will it be a limited time or ongoing? What data is being assessed – Is it a particular demographic? Is it product-specific or more generally about the company’s website? Will it cover costs and how to possibly save them?
Platforms
Another element of the data collection process comes in the platforms used both for data collection and products alike. This time you need to ask questions like:
The speed of IT? What does the IT team specialise in? Can data be safely collected while following the rules of compliance and security? How should data integration be performed? Manually or automatically? (this of course depends on the platform and tools being used!) Do I meet my technical requirements?
Programmability
Relevant to the platforms being used, you need to understand what sorts of tools you’ll be using, as well as which programming language. The questions you’d need to ask about this segment almost completely link up to those in the ‘Platforms’ section.
Certain platforms may use certain coding language, which should be agreed upon by the team to avoid any confusion. It’s important that the team knows how they’ll be handling and collecting the relevant data.
Use the 5 P’s!
With the 5 P’s in mind as well as all the logical questions and steps to follow them, you can get started on a successful data analysis project to kickstart a new era of prosperity and success in your business!
It may feel overwhelming reading through the process and deciding how and why to implement professional data analytics into your company. Businesses everywhere are improving their fundamentals with it, and as the years go on, this lucrative side of the business only continues to expand with more tools available, more people trained in it, and being much more essential for any business to thrive in this online world.
So absolutely grab an account on one of the many helpful platforms and start improving your business’ performance today! Most of them are free to get started on and even have small courses for you to follow to properly understand how to use them to their full advantage.
Whether you’re a one-man show or a whole company, it’s never too late to get on the rising science of data analytics and see how it can bring some improvements and prosperity to any business you may be running.