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Most of you would be aware of the term Big Data, even those who are not related to IT would have come across this word many times. To begin with one should be clear as to what is data ? If you are thinking that Data is Information then you are wrong. There’s a major difference between the two, data is raw, unprocessed while information is the ‘analyzed’ form of data. For example, you have a collected names and age of 500 people. Now this is data because these are just raw numbers put in excel sheet. Let’s say you analyze this and find out that out of these 500 people, 300 are below the age of 25 – this is information which is of some use. It all starts with collecting data and then analyzing it to extract meaningful information from it and this process is termed as analytics.
Analytics is extraction and discovery of meaningful patterns from the data set. And mind you, Analytics is one of the most important aspect in the digital world and has a huge impact on businesses. So in the previous example when you digged into the data, you realized that about 300 people were aged 25 or less. If you ‘analyse’ it further, you might find that 160 of them are jobless and you can take their skill set. Now this data can be very useful in certain scenarios, like when you want to employ someone in your office, you know who to get and from where. Data analytics is vital in today’s digital world where everything and everyone is connected and some or the other transaction in digital form. And by transaction I don’t relate specifically to money only, it can anything like searching for an item, or posting a blog post etc. Analytics are most widely used for market research, where in a company wants to know learn more about the habits of its customers.
How is Analytics useful ?
Let’s assume you are at a super market which has an automated billing system in place so with this whatever you purchase will be recorded in the systems. So a store manager can ‘analyze‘ the bills of thousands of customers and ‘discover‘ a pattern. He may conclude that at least 85% of the customers who buy Shampoo buy Conditioner also. And with this he could place all the conditioners right next to the shampoo. This will not only make it easy for the customers but will have a positive impact on the sales.
Another scenario can be of a webmaster who is maintaining a website. With lots of tracking tools available now, he can keep an eye on every move of the user on their website. From this he can learn that Entry and Exit pages on his website. Apart from this, he can learn what content on his website is liked the most. With this, he can generate more content which is liked by all to increase the visits and hits on his website. He can also analyze the user’s location and in turn generate content for that location so as to increase the visits from that location, so you see the impact ?
Analytics from what you have read till now, you might think its a small and simple thing. But it’s not. Analytics require a lot of experience and patience to find a meaningful pattern from the raw data. And here the data runs in millions, which makes it even more tougher. So Data Analytics can have a huge impact on any business as it will help them save a lot of money and other resources and in turn streamline their strategy to target their customers.
This blog post is inspired by the blogging marathon hosted on IndiBlogger for the launch of the #Fantastico Zica from Tata Motors. You can apply for a test drive of the hatchback Zica today.
