UNIT 4

ANALYTICS
Anjan Kumar Ghosh
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Digital: Some facts

• Global Internet Usage: As of April 2025, approximately 5.64 billion people worldwide are using the internet,
representing 68.7% of the global population .

• Social Media Engagement: There are 5.22 billion active social media users globally, accounting for over 60% of
the world's population .

• Consumer Preferences: Around 70% of consumers express a desire for personalized shopping experiences .

• Big Data Analytics Adoption: Approximately 87.9% of companies prioritize investments in data and analytics,
recognizing its strategic importance .

• Digital is the adjective used to describe how we are changing the way we operate socially and professionally to reflect

emerging technologies and increasing connectivity to the people and objects around us.

• Digital enables us to transmit and store data or information and apply this information and technology to improve

human performance and better tackle our tasks. Digital has many aspects, and this course gives you an introduction
to some of its key areas such as Social Media, Digital Marketing, Mobility, Analytics and User Experience.
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Some Key Concept in Marketing

• E-Commerce (electronic commerce) is the buying and selling of goods and services online, for example,

buying something from a clothes website.

• Price - The amount of money expected, required, or given in payment for a good or service.

• Sales - The exchange of a good or service for money.

• Lead generation - A digital marketing process of attracting customer interest by collecting names and

contact information about potential customers who will be contacted by the salespeople for generating
orders. The aim of lead generation is to drive users to your website, or more generally to increase your
sales prospects.

• Market leader - The brand, product or company selling the largest quantity of a particular product. A

market leader often dominates its competitors in areas such as customer loyalty, image, price, profit and
spending on marketing and advertising.
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• Branding : The process of creating a unique name, image or logo for a business or product/service

in the consumer’s mind. Branding aims to create a presence in the market that attracts and keeps
loyal customers. Branding is used with the aim of increasing awareness, engagement and loyalty.

• Campaign: A planned series of actions or strategies that aims to achieve a specific goal. For

example, a social media campaign is coordinated marketing effort using one or more social media
platforms to achieve a business goal, for example, to increase website traffic or improve brand
engagement.

• Client : A person or organization paying to use the services of another professional person or

company.

• Customer churn: Customer churn (also known as churn rate) is the loss of clients or customers (in

a given time period). For example, if a mobile phone network provider has 1000 customers in
January and this falls to 800 customers in February, the customer churn would be calculated by
dividing the number of customers lost, by the original number of customers (1000 - 800)/1000 =
200/1000 = 20%.
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Segmentation
• Segmentation is a marketing strategy which involves dividing a broad target market into smaller groups

with common needs interests, and priorities, allowing you to create a strategy to specifically target them.
Segmentation allows you to separate and analyse subsets of your data. For example, you may segment
your data based on consumer purchasing behaviour, demographics or geographical location.

• A good example of this might be a student filling up at a fuel station. So typically, students have less

money than the working population, so they might only put 10 pounds of fuel in at a time. So this will put
them in the lower value segments of the fuel retailer. Now this fuel retailer can then use that to target the
students to try and buy more fuel by offering them a discount. This will then move them into higher value
segments, and they'll become loyal customers so that when they do start working, they will continue to
use that brand.

• [Link]
analytics-e737e9b05427
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Data
• Facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis.

• A data set is a collection of related data that has separate elements but can be managed as a

whole. In a database, for example, a dataset might contain a collection of business data such as
employee names, salaries and contact information.

• Qualitative data is information that describes something, for example, gender, species, and hair

colour. This type of data is useful to find out what people think or feel about a task and it is
generally more difficult to analyse and draw conclusions from as you can’t always directly compare
the data. An example of qualitative data would be a comment from a user saying “I enjoyed using
this site”.

• Quantitative data is any kind of data that can be measured and represented with numbers. For

example, quantitative data is used to measure things precisely, such as the temperature, the
number
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Data Mining and Data analysis

• Data integration- Taking data from multiple sources and combining it. You will need high quality
data in the right format in order to be able to analyse the data.
• Data mining - Analysing large databases for new information and relationships that have not
previously been discovered.
• Text mining-With text mining technology, you can analyze text data from the web, comment fields,
books and other text-based sources to uncover insights you hadn't noticed before.
• Text mining uses machine learning or natural language processing technology to comb through
documents – emails, blogs, Twitter feeds, surveys, competitive intelligence and more – to help you
analyze large amounts of information and discover new topics and term relationships.
• Data Analysis - A detailed examination of data and facts to understand how they are related to
each other, and provide a basis for problem solving and decision
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Data Analytics
• Data analytics is the process of systematic analysis of data or statistics for the discovery, interpretation,

and communication of meaningful patterns in data.

• Data analytics is important because it helps businesses optimize their performances. Implementing it

into the business model means companies can help reduce costs by identifying more efficient ways of
doing business and by storing large amounts of data.

• Data analysis vs. Data analytics

• Data analysis is a process involving the collection, manipulation, and examination of data for getting a deep

insight, whereas data analytics is taking the analyzed data and working on it in a meaningful and useful way to
make well-versed business decisions
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Big data analytics

• Big data refers to data that is so large, fast or complex that it’s difficult or impossible to process using traditional
methods.
• Big data analytics helps organizations harness their data and use it to identify new opportunities. That, in turn, leads
to smarter business moves, more efficient operations, higher profits and happier customers. Businesses that use big
data with advanced analytics gain value in many ways, such as:
• Reducing cost.- Big data technologies like cloud-based analytics can significantly reduce costs when it comes to
storing large amounts of data (for example, a data lake). Plus, big data analytics helps organizations find more
efficient ways of doing business.
• Making faster, better decisions - The speed of in-memory analytics – combined with the ability to analyze new
sources of data, such as streaming data from IoT – helps businesses analyze information immediately and make fast,
informed decisions.
• Developing and marketing new products and services - Being able to gauge customer needs and customer
satisfaction through analytics empowers businesses to give customers what they want, when they want it. With big
data analytics, more companies have an opportunity to develop innovative new products to meet customers’
changing needs
• [Link]
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Types of data analytics

• Descriptive analytics: Use data aggregation and data mining techniques to provide insight into the past and
answer: “What has happened?” Descriptive analytics is useful because it allows us to learn from past behaviours.
• Diagnostic analytics: Diagnostic analytics is a form of advanced analytics which examines data or content to
answer the question “Why did it happen?”, and is characterised by techniques such as drill-down, data discovery,
data mining and correlations.
• For example, if an online retailer is losing money, they might measure the clickthru rates of the links and exit rates
of pages along the customer journey, to see where they are losing people.
• Predictive analytics: The process of using statistics and forecasting techniques to get information from existing
data in order to recognise patterns and predict future outcomes and trends.
• This form of analytics aims to answer the question “What could happen?”. Predictive analytics provides
companies with actionable insights based on data. It is important to remember that no statistical algorithm can
“predict” the future with 100% certainty since the analytics is based on probabilities. This is important as business
decisions need to be based on predictive analytics and not purely on gut instinct or experience.
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• Prescriptive analytics - A relatively new field of analytics, it examines data to predict what will happen

and to suggest the optimal actions required to make a desired decision. It also aims to answer questions
such as, “What should be done?” or “What can we do to bring about a certain result?”

• For example, when Google Maps collects data about traffic at rush hour, they are able to prescribe a

better route for drivers. For those of us who are measuring the effectiveness of design rather than traffic,
prescriptive data still identifies patterns, and can thus inform our future design decisions.
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Data analysis process

• As the data available to companies continues to grow both in amount and complexity, so too does the need for an
effective and efficient process by which to harness the value of that data. The analysis method typically moves through
several iterative phases. Let’s take a closer look at each.
• Identify the business question you’d like to answer. What problem is the company trying to solve? What do you need to
measure, and how will you measure it?
• Collect the raw data sets you’ll need to help you answer the identified question. Data collection might come from internal
sources, like a company’s client relationship management (CRM) software, or from secondary sources, like government
records or social media application programming interfaces (APIs).
• Clean the data to prepare it for analysis. This often involves purging duplicate and anomalous data, reconciling
inconsistencies, standardizing data structure and format, and dealing with white spaces and other syntax errors.
• Analyze the data. By manipulating the data using various data analysis tools and techniques, you can begin to find
trends, correlations, outliers, and variations that begin to tell a story. During this stage, you might use data mining to
discover patterns within databases or data visualization software to help transform data into an easy-to-understand
graphical format.
• Interpret the results of your analysis to see how well the data answered your original question. What recommendations
can you make based on the data? What are the limitations to your conclusions?
Source: [Link]
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Digital analytics: Define your goals

• Most social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube come with free analytics tools.

However, before you start looking at these tools, you need to decide why you want to measure
something. You should focus on metrics that are linked to your business goals and ›key performance
indicators, which help you understand whether things are going well or need to be improved. As a first
step, it can help to write down why you are using social media and what success looks like for you
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SMART Goal
• One methodology that can help you define your goals is called S.M.A.R.T. That means goals should be:

➢ (S)pecific: By defining specific goals you know precisely what you are working towards. If your goals are vague then you
never know when you are successful. Are 10 new followers a success or do you need 1,000 to be successful?
➢ (M)easurable: Think about how you will measure your goals and if you can measure them with the tools that you have. If
you can’t measure progress towards your goal, it may not be specific enough and if you are not able to measure your
progress you will never know whether you have achieved your goal.
➢ (A)ttainable: Make sure that your goals are realistic. If you only have 1,000 Twitter followers, then getting to 100,000
within a year is probably not realistic, but getting to 3,000 might be. Having attainable goals means that you are more
likely to be successful and less likely to be frustrated.
➢ (R)elevant: Focus on measuring things that are linked to what you want to achieve on social media. It can be very
tempting to collect dozens of metrics because you can, even though you might only need to look at one or two. Sticking
to relevant metrics will help ensure that you are not wasting any time.
➢ (T)imely: Commit to a time frame to measure your progress and to reach your goals. This will make your goals and the
process of achieving them more concrete. For example, define a goal that you want to reach one year from now and
commit to taking a measure at the end of every month.
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Metrics
• The most granular form of data

• Metrics describe the exact numbers that make up the data.

• More simply, they are the raw ingredients that make analytics possible. On their own, they may not

actually be very helpful, but studied in the right context (foreshadow alert -- this is analysis), they can be
used to give fact-based direction to your decision-making.

• All of these units of measurement report activity or results of very specific user interactions in your

marketing efforts.
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The core metrics in web analytics are:

• Hits A hit represents a request to a web server. A web page may create several hits to a web server.

One for the web page, other requests for each image on the page, any includes, etc. Therefore, a web

page that contains 6 images would create 7 hits to a web server. So except for the needs of server

support staff, this metric provides no business value.

• Page Views The Page View metric represents the number of times a web page has been displayed. It is

useful for determining the popularity of select content.

• Visit A Visit (or session as Web Trends refers to is) is represented by activity during a period of time

(usually 30 minutes) that takes place on a website.

• Visitors Visitors are one of the most unique metrics used in web analytics. By default, a visitor is

represented by an IP address or a cookie.

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Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

• A key performance indicator (KPI) is a measurable value that helps evaluate progress towards a goal.

• Demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives.

• Organizations use key performance indicators at multiple levels to evaluate their success at reaching

targets. High-level KPIs may focus on the overall performance of the enterprise, while low-level KPIs
may focus on processes or employees in departments such as sales, marketing or a call center.

• Defining key performance indicators can be a tricky business. The operative word in KPI is “key”

because every KPI should relate to a specific business outcome with a performance measure.

• For example, a KPI for measuring the success of a social media campaign may include the number of

likes, shares or mentions that the campaign receives.

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Source: [Link]
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Benchmarking and Channel

• An established point of reference against which something can be measured in order to compare performance or

reliability.
• • ‘Internal’ benchmarking is setting expectations based on your own historical performance, and this historical data can be

used as a point of reference to create KPI targets.

• • ‘External’ benchmarking is adding context to your data by comparing it with data from the competitors in your industry. This
allows businesses to understand how well they are performing and recognise areas that may need improvement.

• A channel is a means of conveying or transmitting information or communication. A channel can be a

website/application or even different devices. For example, Twitter and Facebook are social media channels
which enable us to express ourselves and share information. Websites which display company advertising are
digital marketing channels enabling a company to share information about their products and services with their
customers.
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Web Analytics
• Web Analytics collects, analyzes, and reports data about numbers and types of visitors, page views, and

much more.

• Method for obtaining data for web analysis

1. Web Server Log data: Data obtained from user’s web server can be parsed by client-side software to
make the data meaningful.

2. Page Tag data: JavaScript code placed on each tracked page provides in-depth information about the
page and the client’s browser device.
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Web Server Log Data

• Web Server Logs give more accurate and comprehensive output, hence better insight in to website.

• They record various information from each request made to the server. Server logs also provide important information about time and
type of request, domain request, referring URL, 404 requests, broken links, and various other information.

• This way you can fix these problems to better accommodate your users and the search crawlers. Logs are very detailed as they
contain information such as Image requests, CSS files, JavaScript files, Search engine bot traffic.

• In Server logs it is difficult to track at user level, little information about how visitors use site, requests from search engine bots can
distort figures and they don’t count views of pages which are cached. Typically server logs are read with some Log Analysis Software
such as AWStats (Advanced Web Statistics) and Webalizer.
• Pros
• Counts every request to server
• User own the data
• Cons
• Expensive initial
• Data parsing required before analyzing
• Cumbersome management of Server Logs
• Storage intensive
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Page Tag Data

• Page tag-based web analytic systems obtain similar data as server logs.
• Obtain information about the client’s browser, operating system, custom IDs and tags, as well as
conversion data, unattainable from server logs.

• Pros
• Cheaper to set up / Pay as you go
• Believed to be more accurate than server logs
• Speed of data reporting
• Flexibility of data collection

• Cons

• Dependant on JavaScript & Cookies

• Implemented required for every tracked page
• Sometimes complex tag implementations
• Who owns the data?
• Privacy issues
• Slight performance issues
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Web Analytics Tools

• Google Analytics.

• Adobe Analytics.

• Mixpanel.

• Matomo.

• StatCounter.

• Yandex Metrica.

• Amplitude.

• Baidu Analytics
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Google Analytics
• Google Analytics is an online tool offered by Google that measures and reports website activity &
performance.
• Google Analytics is the most widely used web analytics application that helps to understand the behavior
pattern of website visitors. Google Analytics emerged from Urchin Software Corporation, which Google
bought in 2005.
• Over the years, Google analytics have managed to gain popularity because of its simplicity and numerous
advanced features for site owners and professional marketers.
• The site owners and marketers can identify how visitors actually interact with the websites by using this
tool.
• Auto generated report by Google Analytics facilitates the site owners and the marketers to improve site
designs, drive targeted traffic, and increase profits.
• Features include; data visualisation tools (dashboards etc. displaying changes in data over time), email-
based sharing and communication, and the ability to add other Google products.
• For more visit [Link]
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Advantages of Google Analytics

• Cost It is absolutely free. This is the coolest feature for most of the people involved.

• Usability It is not just bound to the experts. Anyone without having strong programming skill can use it. It has made

analyzing very easy for both the specialists and the non-specialists.

• Availability of tutorials Google provides an online tutorial to learn about Google Analytics. It has made learning the

system extremely easy.

• Installation It is easily installable. There is no programming skills required to install it unlike in other analytical tools.

• Visitors views by Geography, Timeframe and Source. It allows getting and viewing the number of visitors to the site

based on some time frame. It also allows one to find the geographical location of all the visitors and also the source

which helped them find it.

• Visitor’s details It also provides details of each visitor including the time of their stay on the website, the web pages

the accessed, the number of links they clicked on etc. There is also a concept of Bounce Rate that shows the

number of visitors in and out of a web page and also the visitors who stayed longer.