Nine Types of Analytics for Businesses to Succeed

Business that see growth have one thing in common — analytics. Learn what types of analytics for businesses you’ll need for growth.

Image Source: Pixabay 

According to a study done by McKinsey & Company,” companies with the greatest overall growth in revenue and earnings receive a significant proportion of that boost from data and analytics.” 

With this statistic in mind, the notion that tracking your business processes is instrumental in business success becomes easier and easier to defend. With analytics tools, you can identify what’s working and what’s not in all facets of your business. They also give you insights into the most productive improvements and decisions in all of your departments. 

When the word “analytics” gets thrown around, most people think about data analytics. However, there are different kinds of analytics and various things that they can encompass. 

Let’s look at eight types of analytics for businesses and how to use them. 

Data Analytics 

It’s difficult to attribute a single definition to data analytics. But generally, it refers to the practice of analyzing raw data and extracting valuable insights from that data. 

You can use data analytics to learn about a broad range of business practices. For instance, you can collect data on who your customers are and how they behave. Or, you can find out more about how you’re using particular tools and what that means for your team’s productivity. 

Now, let’s move into more specific analytics types, starting with business analytics. 

Business Analytics 

Business analytics is the collection and analysis of business-specific data.    

You can use this type of analytics to analyze specific businesses practices further and make informed decisions on how to improve your company overall—for example, improving how you allocate financial resources or boost productivity within your teams. 

When implementing business analytics tools, it’s important to note the difference between data science and business analytics. Both data science and business analytics are in the business of streamlining a company’s processes, strategies, and procedures. However, in contrast to the definition above, data science focuses on gaining insights and information from the data you collect.  

Knowing the difference between business analytics and data science can be extremely helpful when working with multiple analytics professionals and determining the roles they’ll play in your company.

Customer Analytics 

The experts at AppDirect say that “customer analytics refers to the technologies and processes used to give an organization insights into customer behavior during the buyer’s journey. This refers to different trends, habits, commonalities between customers that occur across all departments in a company.” 

With customer analytics, you can analyze customer behavior in-depth and use what you learn to optimize how you attract new potential customers, connect with current customers, and retain as many as possible for as long as possible. You can also learn how your customers navigate your online presence and eliminate the friction in their buyer’s journey.  

Sales Analytics 

This resource defines sales analytics as “the process used to identify, model, understand, and predict sales trends and sales results while helping in the understanding of these trends and finding improvement points.” In other words, this type of analytics puts the spotlight on your sales processes with the intention of providing valuable insights that enhance those processes. 

You can use sales analytics to drive sales growth and uncover opportunities to better the experience customers have when making a purchase.  

Competitor Analysis 

A competitor analysis breaks down what your competitors are doing, from what products and services their offering to what marketing strategies they use and how they deploy them to their customer support initiatives to their overall business performance.  

A properly conducted competitive analysis will help you highlight the gaps between the way you run your business and the way your competitors are running theirs. For example, you can pinpoint the mistakes they’re making in their customer service process and use this information to better care for your customers when they have an issue or challenge with your products/services.   

You can also use competitor analysis to identify what your competition is having success with, how to bring their dissatisfied customers to you, and what new market opportunities are available. 

Marketing Analytics 

Marketing analytics gathers data on the return-on-investment or ROI of specific marketing campaigns, techniques, and overall initiatives. 

Marketing analytics enable you to evaluate the success of your marketing efforts. You can find out what’s working and what isn’t when it comes to your marketing messaging, the channels and platforms you use, when and how you deploy your campaigns, and which marketing types resonate most with your ideal customers. 

AdWords Analysis 

AdWords analysis refers to monitoring the performance of your pay-per-click or PPC ad campaigns. It helps you measure the effectiveness of each campaign and evaluate opportunities for improvement. 

Ad campaigns will likely be a considerable part of your marketing efforts, especially for search engine optimization or SEO and social media marketing. So, taking action on the insights you receive from AdWords analysis is crucial to ensuring optimal results. 

Web Analytics 

Web analytics is the collection and analysis of website data. They can help you identify how users behave across web pages and what contributes to a pleasant user experience. 

Web analytics are also integral when it comes to measuring your core web vitals. Core web vitals measure page loading time, how quickly browsers respond to inquiries, and content stability. All of these things matter when gauging whether a user’s had a good experience on your website. 

Conclusion 

Analytics for businesses are integral to successful growth. Without analytics tools, company leaders wouldn’t make informed business decisions across the organization that drives company growth and longevity. Start with the above ten types of analytics for businesses to get you on your way to making effective decisions for your company. 

You can implement any of the above types of analytics by doing thorough research on the tools out there first. The research stage is crucial because you may not need a different tool for each type of analytics you want to do. There may be an option out there that allows you to house most of these analytics under one roof.  

After conducting your research, narrow down your choices to your top two or three tools, you can afford to implement right now. These tools should also be easy for you to learn so that the learning curve isn’t so long. 

Once you’ve decided which analytics tools to use, you can choose a day for these tools to go live and schedule training for yourself and team members to ensure you’re taking full advantage of your chosen tools.