Every year eCommerce companies generate a huge amount of marketing, sales, user, and inventory data. However, the challenge that companies face is how to use this enormous amount of data in business analytics and utilize it to grow their business.
In such cases, Business Analytics plays a major role in sorting out corporate data. It utilizes a set of tools, technologies, methods, practices, and processes like Data Mining to chalk out the most useful information to predict the future of a company. With the help of data and statistical methods, Business Analytics tries to understand the performance of a certain company and also focuses on developing new insights. Business Analytics uses predictive and analytical models and extensively uses numerical analysis to bring out the best strategies for a company’s growth.
Role of Business Analytics in a Company can be Classified into 4 Main Types
Data: E-commerce websites collects customers’ data. There are several sources from where raw data is collected for further use. Social media is one such example from where a large amount of customer data is collected, other than E-commerce websites.
Decision-making: Suppose a customer visits an E-commerce website and searches for a certain product in a certain price range, quality, or quantity. This data will automatically go to the website’s owner (company). Now the company can use Business Analytics to make a decision for boosting the sales of their products or attracting customers with new products.
Performance of a company: An E-commerce website can check its performance (Customers’ reviews, total revenue, net profit, gross profit margin, operational cash flow, and other indicators). These data can help to boost the overall performance of the company with the help of Business Analytics. For instance, if the net profit has declined from the last quarter/ year’s profit then Business Analytics can help determine the causes of the decline to work out on a new strategy.
Future prediction: After examining the above parameters, Business Analytics can predict the needs of the consumers and estimate various kinds of marketing strategies, that could allure the customers.
Use of Artificial Intelligence in Business Analytics
In today’s time, the biggest issue E-commerce sellers face is where to find their target audience. However, with the advent of artificial intelligence, the system is doing the job of finding the target audience for us. It helps the companies in decision-making. For example, Google Adwords keeps suggesting you take decisions according to the situation. If you aren’t able to reach your goals, Google Adwords will suggest different strategies to up your game. These suggestions finally help the company to take necessary actions.
The use of artificial intelligence has helped companies to reduce time and effort in deciding on sales and marketing strategies. For example, one person can monitor all the advertisements, and channel performance, and take informed decisions based on AI. Artificial intelligence, in simple terms, uses previous records, and analyzes them to predict the future.
Example: Traffic tracking on Google Maps
Let’s say a large number of slow-moving vehicles are passing by a certain road. AI predicts that even though their average speed is 60 but their moving average speed is 5 on that road. Hence, AI could now calculate that there is high traffic on that certain road. This is how AI uses past data to predict the future.
Machine learning is a type of AI that uses a large number of structured and unstructured data to find out patterns and use it to make predictions. Machine learning boosts the potential of the AI platform. With time, it keeps using more and more data to improve its prediction ability. Business Analytics, therefore, uses artificial intelligence in the form of tools and methods to predict a company’s future performance and improve marketing and sales.
Top Business Analytics Tools
Data is the most crucial factor when dealing with Business Analytics. Raw data has to be extracted from various sources, it has to be analyzed, cleaned and the most relevant information has to be taken out. Business Analytics uses various methods, tools, and processes to perform this task. Data mining is one such process. Tools that work on Data management are SAS Business Analytics (SAS BA), QlikView, Board, and Splunk.
SAS Business Analytics
SAS is a software developed by SAS solutions. It helps users to prepare data for reporting and analytics purposes. SAS provides a self-service, interactive environment. It helps to access the data, combine it, give a shape to the data and clean it to provide the most authentic, relevant, and useful data for predictive analysis.
QlikView
Qlik helps to provide insights for solving business-related problems. It advanced techniques for report generation, provides extremely interactive analytical applications, and many more.
Board
Board Management Software provides a highly secured platform for the company’s board of directors to access important documents and team up with other important members. This software gives security to administrators who can access highly confidential documents. It helps in decision-making by using predictive analysis, and other business intelligence tools like simulation and corporate performance management.
Splunk
Splunk brings the data from the source, indexes, and tally the real-time data in a search warehouse from which it generates reports, graphs, dashboards, alerts, and more. It is used to manage applications, security and conformity, and business plus web analytics.
Conclusion
Business Analytics is a process that shows its result over some time and not overnight. However, it puts your business on the right track and helps to boost the ROI with time. Business Analytics takes the help of previous data, and with the help of predictive analysis, it predicts the future performance of the company, predicts the marketing strategies, goes through the behavior pattern of customers, and predicts its needs. These days without Business Analytics, companies cannot excel in the domain of prediction.
The use of artificial intelligence in business analytics is another crucial step that makes the job of a marketer easier. What A.I. needs, is the relevant data. A. I study the past and current data and provide current results, and also predict the future. With time, A. I keep updating myself with new data. Usage of A. I in Business Analytics will considerably reduce a huge workforce, a few team members can operate the A. I based applications, the results would be accurate and real-time based, which is far better in comparison to results calculated by employees. Therefore, Business Analytics based on Artificial Intelligence will be a boon for corporate houses. Grow Your Business using Data Analytics!
