By Guy Greenberg
Business intelligence has evolved significantly, but the challenge of bringing it to the masses as a powerful and simple solution remains. One of the major challenges is in handling and managing the big data and unifying the different data sources into a steady steam that can be easily analyzed to tell a story.
“Data is like water. When it’s in a glass, it’s very manageable. But when it’s in a flood, it’s overwhelming.” Says Jim Adler, head of data at Toyota Research Institute.
In the digital world where all online businesses track and collect user event data, everyone has an overwhelming need for an agile and scalable digital intelligence that is built to navigate the sea of event data and deliver critical business insights for those fast-growing digital businesses that depend on understanding user behavior for products’ optimization.
Digital intelligence (DI) or as widely known as “analytics” is essential for every digital business, right from the early days. Here’s what to look for when you go shopping for the right solution.
Fully Managed Big Data Infrastructure (so you don’t have to)
The type of business intelligence we’re talking about relies on millions of events collected from all user devices, from all your channels and assets. Such massive amounts of raw level data are easily collected, but then comes the need to be handled, enriched, stored and managed, so it can be easily analyzed.
Building your own big data warehouse from the ground up is an ambitious and complex task requiring significant resources. Does it really make sense to build your own? Instead, wouldn’t you rather put the time and resources into gaining insights and act on them to optimize your product and respond to the rapidly changing needs of your customers?
No More Siloed Data; A Holistic View of All Your Data Sources
Every digital asset and every user touch point yields islands of data providing a narrow angle of understanding limited to that potion of the data. For a holistic view and powerful insights, it is vital that you choose a DI solution that smoothly integrates with all your other marketing and business tools, along with a powerful semantic layer for powerful querying the data efficiently.
Unification of data from email campaigns, Facebook and Google Ads, CRM and financial data, as well as mobile attribution platforms such as AppsFlyer leads to powerful business insights about the user behavior across the complete journey, about campaign effectivity, retention, ARPU, lifetime value and many more user behavior related insights that are vital to understand.
Retailers can analyze ad campaign data together with the behavioral event data for those users who came through this campaign to understand campaign ROI or better optimize online product placement.
Digital media and publishers can understand which is the acquisition channel that brings valuable audience that is most likely to convert and become a loyal paying user that engages with the content best and bother to share it.
Scalable and Elastic Analytics Built for Fast-Growth
Jim Adler, the head of data at Toyota shares his thoughts on big data, saying that “Systems that work on a single machine’s worth of data will be washed away when data scales to grow 100 or 1000 times.”
This is true more in relation to traditional BI solutions, which have plans that commit to preplanned growth. The right digital intelligence solution is designed for scalability and elasticity to support the needs of a digital business that starts small with just thousands of customers and quickly grows to have millions of users that use the app daily and seamlessly send hundreds of millions of event data.
One viral campaign can result in tens of thousands of downloads of your app in a very short time. You need an analytics solution that can handle these data peaks effortlessly.
The Magic Quadrant for Analytics – Managed, Scalable, Powerful and Simple
Let’s face it – a lot of fast-growing startups aren’t making profits while their product is still in development phase, or just launched a beta version. But instead of seeing DI as a cost that should be avoided until your company is profitable, understand that implementing behavioral analytics from day one of your products pays off. The insights you receive from analyzing those first marketing campaigns as the behavioral analysis of the first users contribute greatly to product optimization and successful marketing.
Time is money. Fast-growing digital products need agile digital intelligence that can be implemented quickly, fully integrated with the all the best in class marketing and business tools, are scalable and elastic to contain fast growth.
In other words, as Jim Adler might say: “Choose a digital intelligence solution that can manage a flood of data, not just a glass.”
About the Author
Guy Greenberg is the Co-Founder & President at CoolaData, a leading behavioral analytics platform. Before founding Cooladata, he was the co-founder and CEO of Gilon Business Insight, which was acquired by Ness Technologies in 2010. At Ness Technologies, Guy served as Senior Vice President for Global BI and Big Data, where he worked with some of the largest corporations in the world. With over 20 years of experience in big data and startups, he is an active angel investor and adviser of several Big Data startups.
