Big Data in Businesses

Companies in every sector of the economy have always collected data to help them improve. But since the start of widespread internet access in the 1990s, the amount of available data has exploded. Every day, humans generate over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. Whether it’s webpage views, social media clicks, or Google searches, this aggregated information – known as big data – is a major resource for enterprises. Find out more about big data analytics definitions and how big data analytics can uncover better-informed business decisions.

What Is Big Data Analytics?

Most companies collect large amounts of data daily from their customers, suppliers, and employees. Every time you send an email, process a transaction, post new web content, or share a file, you’re generating data that can provide insights into your business. Big data analytics is a strategy for evaluating and interpreting large volumes of data. This type of business analytics aims to uncover information and insights that can help you improve your operations, increase revenue, and gain a competitive edge.

Big data refers to large and complex data sets that require sophisticated processing tools. Typically, big data is characterized by the following qualities:

• Volume: This refers to the amount and size of the data sets that a company needs to analyze.
• Variety: Big data may be structured, semi-structured, or unstructured.
• Velocity: Big data is collected at a continuous and rapid rate.
• Veracity: This indicates the level of confidence a company has in the quality and credibility of its data.
• Value: Aggregated data offers valuable insights for an organization or enterprise.

With access to analytics, you can use big data to your advantage instead of simply collecting and storing it. Effective big data analytics tools are important because they allow your company to identify patterns, trends, and relationships that help you better understand your current and prospective customers, as well as your sector at large. Regardless of your industry, analytics insights can help you make better decisions and hone your business strategy.

What Are the Benefits of Big Data Analytics?

The insights that you draw from big data can be applied to every aspect of your business. Some of the benefits of big data analytics include the following:

Efficiency and Cost Savings

Analytics software frees up your statisticians and data experts from having to analyze data manually. With big data analytics tools, you can collect and interpret data in real-time, helping you stay agile and quickly respond to customer demands and market trends.

Better Marketing Strategy

Every customer leaves behind a digital footprint. By knowing what your customers view, click on, and purchase, you can make inferences about their needs, interests, and buying behavior. With this information, you can better tailor your products and services to various segments of your audience – creating satisfied customers who are more likely to return to your business.

Beyond the private sector, big data also has value in government and civil society organizations. With robust public data, governmental agencies can improve their service offerings and inform policy decisions and implementation.

How Does it Work?

Traditional computing systems can’t always manage big data. Instead, companies use big data analytics software that safely stores information in a distributed file system. Data processing is distributed among machines, and multiple backups of files are automatically created – so if one computer system fails, you won’t lose any information.

With so much data being collected and stored each day, it can be challenging to know where to start with your data strategy. An excellent way to approach big data is by defining your key performance indicators (KPIs): the metrics that will help you track and measure success. This could include anything from your profit margins to your conversion and engagement rates, and even internal measures like the number of open IT tickets.

Once you know what your KPIs are, you’ll know what relevant data you need to monitor and analyze. For example, if you want to improve your customer conversion rates, you might monitor which social media posts they click on. Your data strategy should include governance, security, and guidelines for how data is retrieved, merged, and analyzed.

Big data analytics software can be used to generate multiple kinds of insights. Analytics are generally grouped into four types:

• Descriptive analytics: This type of analytics tells you what happened in the past. It doesn’t establish cause and effect, but instead provides a snapshot of a point in time. For example, descriptive analytics might measure the number of visitors to your website in the past month.
• Diagnostic analytics: With diagnostic analytics, you can go a step further and establish why something happened. For example, if you see a spike in your web traffic, you may discover a correlation between increased web visitors and earned and paid media around the same time.
• Predictive analytics: This type of analytics is used to forecast what might happen in the future. If you’re curious about what your fourth quarter sales will be, you might analyze the past few years of sales data to make a prediction.
• Prescriptive analytics: This area of analytics is the most complex, but arguably the most valuable for business decisions. Prescriptive analytics takes everything you know about what’s happened in the past and what might happen in the future and creates a roadmap for how you should proceed in your business.

Ramp Up Business Data in Spider Impact

Ready to use big data analytics to your advantage? At Spider Strategies, we’re committed to helping businesses, government agencies, and non-profit organizations become more effective at what they do. Our Spider Impact platform lets you define your KPIs, measure progress, and create clear reports and visualizations to share your insights. Our business intelligence software makes it easy to keep your team on track for better decision-making. Request a free test drive or start your demo today.