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You are tired of creating marketing reports in the traditional way. That’s obvious because it’s time consuming, giving you low customer leads, and mainly everything is scattered. What if like your smart devices you can make your marketing reports in a smarter way. That’s possible and we call it “Data Analytics”; that allows you to track customers digitally using automated technology.

Today we will dive into data analytics; explain the main functions of data analytics and how businesses can get an edge using it. And we are using DashThis as today’s example. DashThis is a successful data analytics platform that has a 360 degree dashboard , data collection, and integration service to give you a headstart.

DashThis is a compact data analytic tool created specifically for business activities. It has a variety of segments like data visualization, tracking leads, statistical models, customizing reports, and many more exciting tools that will stop the marketers squandering their time and focus on what’s important. Owners will be focusing their gaze on only one thing – Outperforming Numbers! Let’s Explore Now!

Online Business- A Shady Place

Every business has one thing in common – Consumer Trend Analysis. You have to retain the customer and constantly attract new customers to be part of your family. For that you require data and an effective analysis tool to find the bottlenecks in your business, find potential markets, create strategies.

Starting an online business is hectic, but what’s more hectic is to keep track of it.

Online businesses and digital marketing have taken over the world, covering every corner of the earth. In 2024, around 14 million websites were listed on google and a staggering 289.2 billion dollars worth of items were sold in the first quarter of 2024- and guess what that’s the data of only the U.S.A market. So nowadays, everyone is selling something online. The number may bring a scrumptious feeling in your mind. But let’s see the full picture. Maintaining an online business is much more rigorous than it seems

You have to-

  • Create a website
  • Run ads to compete and promote
  • Maintain a digital inventory
  • Develop digitalise logistics team
  • Manage your supply chain
  • Secure a trustable payment gateway
  • Tracking data to tap into customer demands

Today we will be focusing on Tracking Data.

Benefits of DashThis

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Functions of Data Analytics

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Data - The Digital God?

How does Google make money? They are not charging you money to use their search engine. They just show you ads, to be specific personal ads. You won’t see 2 persons getting the same ad on Google. They show you ads based on your recent activities- what sites you have been surfing. They track your activities. And show their ads according to that.

All the challenges mentioned above require a cost. But whether the cost is worth it depends on how much money you are making via Sales. Money comes from customers. And customers give us data. We collect the data while they are making the purchase – Name, Age, Account Number, Address. But these are pretty raw data. We have to extract something meaningful from this so that we can predict their expectations. Visualizing models, drawing probabilities, reading thousands of data can be excruciatingly painful and take hours. For this, we use Data Analysis softwares.

These softwares can-

  • Analyze an excel sheet to find out the most profitable product and service
  • Create models to identify customer behavior
  • Execute statistical test to predict the possibilities
  • Build a logical connection between dots
  • Bring insights to layout strategies for business.

Data analysis tools can be used for several other purposes. We will show you how each component of data analytics operates. And we are going to explain this through a tool that has been specially designed for sales in business. This tool is designed for the maketeres to produce hassle free market reports. Cool design and automated technology to boost your workflow. DashThis – a box of treats for businesses to thrive and to be efficient.

Data Analytics - How it Functions

A new cafe has been opened in the heart of a city. They offer delicate pastries and soothing coffee. They are thinking of spanning their product line and starting online delivery. After having a team meeting and checking the financial ability, they thought to carry on with the new project. They have hired a digital marketing team to start a campaign for this project.

After the completion of the first month, they found out a positive result. New customers were added and the cafe made a decent profit. Not a bad start. A few months passed and suddenly the profit started to wane. The marketing team was called on to prepare reports. The team as usual showed numbers (costs they were burning behind ads, promotion, boosting, and how many new customers they were bringing each month). Everything seemed to be good but something was offbeat.

The chart only represented numbers and values, a column of profit and a column of cost. It missed a major part :’Data’, to be specific customer data. The digital marketing team failed to analyze how many customers were retained after each month. They had zero idea about customer behavior ( what they like and what not). They did not have any KPIs that would help them to predict their strong zones.

Business is not only about numbers now, it’s a game of data. Human behavior is a bunch of data- it’s sad but true. Everything’s organized and easy to solve when you have all the pieces. Data Analytics or let’s say it Sales Analytics as we are talking about sales. Sales Analytics will –

1. Data Collection

A business has to Collect Data first as an input. Whilst running a campaign, it will send emails, share postcards, run form fill-up for discount and many more tactics. The tool will pull the information it has found from those sources you have used. If you use a paid Data Analytics software, sometimes they will collect data of customers on a detailed basis such as their online activities, their latest purchases, and budget spent on different items. The more digitized a customer becomes, the more data he or she is giving to us.

2. Find out Customers Background

The next step after data collection is Filtering the Customer data. This is a detailed and multi step procedure. Firstly, outliers are pushed aside. Then relevant or useful data of customers are organized. They filter the background of a customer and try to create a sketch of the person. According to clients’ demand, they filter out the information required.

Sometimes they work on age, location, and buying habits. Sometimes they work on how often he takes medicine, how often he watches fitness ads or shows. The purpose is to fit that person on a certain shelf. Categorizing them.

3. Analyzing the Data

Analyze the Data; Here the magic happens. The data they have collected, they try to find out his eating habit, budgetary plan, products or services the customer has been looking for. Tracking that person’s online activities and even offline. Doing a logical and sensitive analysis to see what the customer considers while making a purchase. Here the person’s overall mindset is being read. After processing the analytics, it’s decided whether he is the right customer. Or is there any possibility of turning him into a customer?

4. Draw Forecast for Future

Predicting is what we do in business.It’s a process to stay 2 steps forward. Now the tool knows whether he is a potential customer. Now he will try to predict his upcoming behaviors and follow the trends. This is called getting customer insights. Statistical models such as Decision trees, Naive Bayes, principal component analysis, Markov chains and many more come to be handy in this stage, segmenting customers according to their habits. This analysis will tell you what should be your product cost, which products you should produce more, when buyer have the tendency to purchase your product, how loyal he is to you.

These 3 are the main tasks a data analyst performs.

I have explained this in a plain language. But if we break it more, we will get 6 steps to perform Sales Analytics:

1. Market Research Analysis

Here the marketing team conducts a market research of your product. What companies exist with similar products, market position of each company, customer share of each company.

2. Product Analysis

Find out the cost offered for the raw materials, the production cost, market sell price, total sales in the market. Everything that resonated with the product is brought here.

3. Sales Current Scenario

How’s your company currently performing, what’s it turnover, comparing with market sell rate, how many leads are generated each month- how is your business doing. And try to create a gap analysis- where it wants to reach.

4. Conversion Rate

How many customers are retained every month, how many loyal customers the company owns, sales pipeline velocity. The cash you are burning every month- is it really worth it? Here calculations are done on the market on a regular basis to predict your customer behavior.

5. Forecast

Collect the past data. Check the trends and the sales that were made, how long each cycle lasted and the average sales in those periods. Based on the past data, the future is visualized. If the right method and correct data are at hand, there is a high chance of accuracy in predicting. So usage of models coke to a question over here.

6. Churn Analytics

Here they find out which customers you should avoid investing in. This stage is specifically for cost saving. Instead of sending ads to everyone, send to those who are actually interested. It’s based on their purchase activity, their lifetime value, and customer acquisition cost. These metrics are used by the marketers and planners to set the KPIs for the business.

After doing all of these you have to bring this in one page. And here comes our mate DashThis.

DashThis - Marketers Paradise

If you search for the top data analytics tool, you will not be able to find DashThis in the top 10. But if you search for top sales or business oriented analytics, DashThis will be in the top 5. The reason why DashThis is able to sustain its position is because they were once marketers while they embarked on this new journey. It was in 2011 when digital marketing was yet to take over the world.

Founder Stephane Guerin was working for his clients. He was organizing the reports with his team using excel and other manual softwares. After working for 15 years in this industry, he was a bit frustrated about the process. He was questioning the manual procedure of this tedious task and was looking for something more efficient. Data collection, filter, process, organize- why can’t everything be done after one roof?

Instead of boring static excel why not bring something more visually appealing for the viewers? Why not use some advanced tools for integration? Leaving the job and with complete self finance, the voyage began. After almost 13 years of journey, DashThis is such a company that has hardly seen loss. And as the digital saga was rising, their demand was also increasing proportionately.

Because DashThis provides –

1. Unlimited Data Sources

No matter whatever analytics tool you use, if the input is poor, the result will follow. And data collection is one of the most hectic and sensitive steps mentioned earlier. DashThis allows you to link multiple fb pages, google analytics accounts to get as much as data you want for a better output. Your data will automatically update after importing the CSV file. You don’t have to regularly update your dashboard.

2. Choose Your Templates

Making a template from scratch is a painful job. But what if you have ready made sets at your hand. You just copy and paste your reports to find out the optimum result. Adding some more benefits, you can also customize the pre-set templates according to your need. This not only stops here. You can play with the themes and widgets too. You can choose them according to your brand picture. And guess what if you have two clients who have almost the same business and the report is mostly similar, you can clone it with a simple click. How many times you have saved just think!

3. Customizing your URL

You are a pro and you have created a custom dashboard for you. But while sharing it, you want to have the link contain your company name. Guess what it’s feasible. You can implant your company name in the URL despite it having been created in DashThis. You want to use your logo too? No problem. We got you. You can attach your personalized touch to your dashboard and make it like your home. DashThis loves their customers and values their brands. Hence they provide everything that will enhance the power of that brand.

4. Integration of other applications

The main reason behind creating DashThis was to bring everything under a single umbrella. Starting from YouTube to Ahrefs to Google Analytics, more than 30 tools have been integrated in DashThis. You won’t have to squander time as before gathering insights from each site now. You can stay on DashThis and bring data from everywhere in a single click.

DashThis - Why So Popular?

There are numerous marketing data analytics platforms like SEMRush, Hubspot, Tableau, Maropost. If you check DashThis website, you will see it is rating some of the best marketing analytics softwares. It also mentions their alternatives. It sounds a bit weird though but it actually tells how confident they are in their system. They have been operating for 14 years. 500k+ KPIs is actually a really big number for a sales analytics company. Let’s discuss what it excels in –

1. Simplicity in User Interface

First and foremost reason why DashThis is popular is their User Interface. They have around 18 thousand users and are performing in more than 120 countries. You will find that most people are fans of their easy to set up interface. When a new business is taking off, most of the time, the founder and co-founder seems to handle everything. They need something easy to use so that they can focus on other tasks too.

2. Proper Customer Service

Customer service is another factor why DashThis is quite trustable among users. They allow you unlimited domains, unlimited email services. How to get yourself going, brick by brick they guide you. It’s a tremendous support for everyday beginners who start a career as a marketing analyst.

3. Customization Service

DashThis provides you hell of a customisation like no other. You can clone reports, customize aligning to your brand theme, and play with it. Most of the clients are happy to use DashThis just because of the flexibility it’s providing to customers. Their data collection and integration softwares are no match, according to their users.

Conclusion

All this data was collected from customer reviews. We collected their features, stories from their blogs, and their dashboard. We have tried to explain in a plain but thorough way how data analytics work for sales. I hope you have enjoyed reading the article. In today’s business world 59.5% of businesses use data analytics to incite innovation. According to research led by Mckinsey, businesses that use data analytics achieve growth 1.5 times higher than average.

Therefore, it’s an open secret of successful businesses. In upcoming chapters, we will go a bit deeper in sales analytics where we will discuss models and will show how calculation is done to measure and forecast and how KPI is measured. So, requesting to bear with us. And get used to data analytics.It’s worth using.

© Review Part 2024