Lecture4 : Data Driven Decision making with Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most comprehensive tools used for tracking the Web presence.  It is the gateway for some body who wants to measure the pulse of their web presence.

The lecture was an interesting one considering the myriad of suggestions that came up for the Alumni and Partnering opportunities sections. It captured the diverse views and various ways of approaching the same problem. While one can understand that people interpret the same data in different ways, it must also be noted that there are some ground rules for making data driven decisions. It is certainly not possible to have a comprehensive list of these nevertheless here are a few

(1) It is very important to state the metrics used for decision making and the time period for analysis. Also, there has to be a proper justification for choosing the same.

(2) Every suggestion you make should be supported by a relevant metric. Also it is important to justify the relevance of the metric in the context. ( Bounce rate may be relevant in one context and Exit rate in the other).

(3) Percentages make sense in some context while numbers make sense in some other. It is important to understand the context to choose between the two.

(4) Lastly it is important to understand that data driven facts should be supplemented by grounded non data driven facts. Some of them are obvious to the context we are analyzing so they also play an important role in the suggestions we make. There is nothing called "Pure Data Driven Decisions".

Second Post but Fresh Thoughts

As the semester grains traction and we move into the third week of the classes, I am for sure trying hard to  garner the required momentum for the rest of the four months.

Of course the class this time starts with the standard and basic question - "What is BI"?. I know there is know single hard and fast definition for this but we will go with the "Wisdom of the Crowds" consensus in defining it

" Business intelligence refers to the class of Tools, Technologies and Techniques required for Collection, measurement, understanding and analysis of data used by firms for either tracking or predicting performance"

This definition encompasses a very broader view of BI but of course as the saying goes the more broad something is the more vague it tends to be. Hence it throws up a myriad of questions like - "What are the Tools?" "What are the Techniques?", "How do you analyse data?" etc.,So let us slice the different parts of the definition so that we have a preliminary understanding of these. This way I guess we will have the agenda for the rest of the semester.

What are the Tools used in BI?

There is no hard and fast list of tools or a comprehensive list of tools documented. In fact the choice of the tool used depends on the metrics the firm is interested in tracking and predicting. How ever the most basic tool used by any company to track its Website metrics is Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/).  This has the most comprehensive list of web metrics for your Website visits and slices and dices the data in different ways. Other commercial BI tools include Microsoft BI Suite, Microstrategy BI Platform, Inetsoft etc., For a pretty comprehensive list of tools, click here .

 What are BI Technologies and name a few technologies used?

Technologies here refer to data integration,data quality, data warehousing, text and content analytics etc., There is no hard and fast definition of a Technology.

What are Techniques used in BI?

There are actually a myriad of them. Predictive Modelling, Descriptive data mining, Association, Correlation and OLAP are a few. For a more comprehensive list refer to this.

I would not certainly go into collection, measurement, analysis and prediction as that would be the topic of my posts for the coming weeks but one last thing that will conclude this post is the KPI.

What is KPI?

Key Performance Indicators are used by the industry to measure performance on one or more dimensions.  They evaluate the success of a company on that particular dimension. Click here for a more comprehensive understanding of KPIs.

As always, I conclude this post with some interesting links for this week.

• 10 Must see YouTube presentations on Social Media.
• What Facebook and Google are hiding from the world.
• History of Business Intelligence.
• Social Bakers : Social Media Statistics
• Business Intelligence : Concepts, Components, Techniques and Benefits

First Post and First Thoughts

Its been quiet  some time since I started blogging and so I was perplexed when I initially had to think about what to blog. And of course this is the first time that I am blogging about a class/lecture and hence I am totally lost. Yet random thoughts continue to flow in my brain as I pen them down.

The first thing that pops into my mind about this course is "8:00 A.M" lecture !!!!! Yes it's been more than half a decade since I had attended a lecture as early as this. But of course the fact that this course seems to involve more interactive sessions so for sure I am not going to feel sleepy!!! All these things apart the course structure seems very comprehensive and is set to engross me for the next 16 weeks. 

Business intelligence is a buzz word today in the industry. In a virtual world dominated by FLAT (Facebook, Linkedin, Amazon and Twitter), companies are continuously faced with the uphill task of making sense of the deluge of data that is publicly available on the internet. Every business knows that this data has a lot of implications to it but they lack the intelligence to make the maximum sense from it. Hence I would say the intelligence required to make this data sensible to the business is what Business intelligence is all about. If so the obvious question that comes into picture is "When did this Business Intelligence start and how did it start?" I am sure people reading this blog are perplexed now and hence I would say this is a question for discussion in the next lecture.

I would conclude this short blog with a set of some websites that I feel are the most important ones I came across in this week. I would welcome suggestions from people to add to this body of knowledge

Basics of Business Intelligence

(1) Wikipedia 

(2) Definition and Solutions 

(3) Google Analytics Channel

(4) Twitter Statistics

(5) Google Adwords

(6) Google+

Interesting News Articles

(1) Men Follow men and No body Tweets

(2) New Chrome plugin give instant Sentiment Analysis of Twitter Search terms

(3) Excel-based Enterprise Dashboard

(4) The new Google +1 button and its effect on SEO

(5) Google is Watching You