Top 2 Data Analytics Techniques:

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There are many techniques to analyze data. In this post, we’re going to talk about two techniques that are critical for good data analysis! They are called “Benchmarking” and “Segmentation” techniques – Let’s talk a bit more about them:

1. Benchmarking

It means that when you analyze your numbers, you compare it against some point of reference. This would help you quickly add context to your analysis and help you assess if the number if good or bad. This is super important! it adds meaning to you data!

Let’s look at an example. CEO wants to see Revenue numbers for 2014 and an analyst is tasked to create this report. If you were the analyst, which report would you think resonated more w/ the CEO? Left or Right?

Benchmarking data providing context in analysis

I hope the above example helped you understand the importance of providing context w/ your data.

Now, let’s briefly talk about where do you get the data for benchmark?

There are two main sources: 1) Internal & 2) External

The example that you saw above was using an Internal source as a benchmark.

An example of an external benchmark could be subscribing to Industry news/data so that you understand how your business is running compared to similar other businesses. If your business sees a huge spike in sales, you need to know if it’s just your business or if it’s an Industry wide phenomenon. For instance, in Q4 most e-commerce sites would see spike in their sales – they would be able to understand what’s driving it only if they analyze by looking at Industry data and realizing that it’s shopping season!

Now, let’s shift gears and talk about technique #2: Segmentation.

2. Segmentation

Segmentation means that you break your data into categories (a.k.a segments) for analysis. So why do want to do that? Looking at the data at aggregated level is certainly helpful and helps you figure out the direction for your analysis. The real magic & powerful insights are usually derived by analyzing the segments (or sub sets of data)

Let’s a look at an example.

Let’s say CEO of a company looks at profitability numbers. He sees $6.5M and it’s $1M greater than last years – so that’s great news, right? But does that mean everything is fine and there’s no scope of optimization? Well – that could only be found out if you segment your data. So he asks his analyst to look at the data for him. So analyst goes back and after some experimentation & interviews w/ business leaders, he find an interesting insight by segmenting data by customers & sales channel! He finds that even though the company is profitable – there is a huge opportunity to optimize profitability for customer segment #1 across all sales channel (especially channel #1 where there’s a $2M+ loss!) Here’s a visual:

segmentation data Improve profitability low margin service offerings customers

I hope that helps to show that segmentation is a very important technique in data analysis!

Conclusion:

In this post, we saw segmentation & benchmark techniques that you can apply in your daily data analysis tasks!

Answering a question using data: Are marketers around the globe shifting their dollars to digital ads?

YoY growth - Digital Ad Spends vs Traditional Ad Spend
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According to the data shared by emarketer, we can clearly see that the Traditional Ad market is reaching a saturation state in 5 major economies (US, China, UK, Japan, Germany) while the digital ad market will see steady growth in some economies & explosive growth in US & China…but the market size of traditional ads will still certainly remain much bigger in US while market size of digital ads in china will overtake the traditional ads in 2017.

So to answer the question: Marketers are not decreasing their existing budgets for traditional ad channels but the increased marketing budget dollars seems to be directed to digital ads market.

Very interesting data-set, I encourage you to play with it!

Thanks Avinash Kaushik for sharing this interesting tool.

I was playing with the data using Excel & Tableau, here’s a public workbook if you’re interested: https://public.tableausoftware.com/profile/paras.doshi#!/vizhome/WorldWideAdSpend/Dashboard-DigitalAdSpendvsTraditionalAdSpend

YoY growth - Digital Ad Spends vs Traditional Ad Spend

Now, it’s your turn! What insights do you get from this data?

#sqlpass webinar: “Data Analytics Explained for Business Leaders” on 1/15

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A quick blog post to let you know about a #sqlpass webinar on 1/15.

Data Analytics Explained for Business Leaders

Thu, Jan 15 2015 12:00 (UTC-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)

RSVP: http://bit.ly/PASSBAVC011515


Abstract:

Description: The world is becoming more efficient. Today, seventy percent of the companies that graced the Fortune 1000 list a mere decade ago have vanished. Agility and survival are function of innovation, culture, and the ability to predict the future. To that end, data analytics offers a lifeline, a means of survival that will drive productivity and continue to disrupt and redefine business. However, the resources available to today’s business leaders sit on two vastly different ends of the spectrum. On the one hand, highly technical academic resources and on the other largely fluffy overviews of value propositions and potentials. The state of the industry shouldn’t be surprising. The same dynamics played out in early years of the internet. Software providers, technical leaders, and consulting firms greatly benefit from mystifying the world of data analytics into something that is incomprehensible. That lack of conceptual understanding is incredibly risky and propels the cost of analytics initiatives upwards. This webcast aims to bridge that gap between the technical data scientists and business leaders. Ultimately, this understanding will help to: – Connect the strategic goals of business leaders with the capabilities of technical advisers – Focus investments and initiatives within analytics and technology – Distill immensely complex subject matter into comprehensible examples – Accelerate the path to value and increase the ROI of analytics initiatives


Speaker Bio

Alex is a Predictive Analytics Architect in the Oil and Gas industry with a passion for distilling complexity into insights and evangelizing data science. His work has been featured on KDNuggets and he was recognized by DataScienceCentral as a top 180 blogger in 2014.

RSVP: http://bit.ly/PASSBAVC011515

I hope to see you there!