Analytics & Intelligence Software Guide
What is Analytics & Intelligence Software?
Analytics and Intelligence software is any digital solution that enables businesses to analyze their data and derive insights from it. With businesses handling larger volumes of data, any software that helps businesses analyze big data and provide actionable analytics, based on which they can make key decisions, is in huge demand – as these software products help management save time, resources and cut down on unnecessary effort by providing more accurate information to work with.
With a large number of solutions offering analytics & intelligence capabilities, businesses use these software products for a variety of tasks and purposes involving data, which has become a key asset for virtually any business today.
Most Popular Analytics & Intelligence Categories
How to Choose Analytics & Intelligence Software
Crucial features of analytics and intelligence software include support for multiple databases and file formats, such as text, XML and Excel. Gathering data and analytical insights can be difficult if the results are not presented in a format that is easy to understand and interpret. This is the reason analytics and intelligence software tend to include features that enable businesses to filter the type of data they want to analyze and generate reports in a format that best fits their needs. Some types of software offer features that automate complex tasks, including multiple visualizations and the option to export data for use in complementary solutions.
When it comes to leading analytics and intelligence software, these functions and processes are generally covered. In some instances, you can integrate the software with your existing network and system where you store or process the data. Many vendors allow you to customize the features of their software according to your requirements, allowing you to use the features you consider the most important. The software, therefore, enables you to optimize the process of handling big data and analyzing it accurately, regardless of volume.
Furthermore, because software offers comprehensive features does not necessarily mean it should take you considerable amounts of time and effort to set it up. This is particularly important in the case of analytics and intelligence, as most of the related tasks are data-intensive, especially data mining and predictive analytics. The software you select should be able to handle big data with ease, giving you greater insight into the data you collect about your business processes, customers, or any other aspect of your business.
More importantly, you should select analytics and intelligence software that offers a user-friendly interface. This will ensure you are able to use the software with ease and you can generate a higher ROI from it. The end product will be analytics reports based on which you can make decisions about the future of your business. Therefore, the software should provide you with easy access to said reports. Keeping all these factors in mind when exploring the subcategories should allow you to select a software solution that will offer the insights needed to scale your business and that will scale with you.
Subcategories of Analytics and Intelligence Software
- A/B Testing: A/B Testing, also referred to as split testing, is an important component of business analytics. Using A/B Testing, businesses compare two different versions of their website, outreach emails, or other testable components for optimization purposes. Software in this segment analyzes conversion rates and other engagement factors of multiple versions and offers comparative analytics about each of them. You can decide which version works best for your campaign based on A/B test results. A/B Testing removes much of the guesswork when creating a marketing campaign or optimizing a website and provides quantifiable data based on which you can select the best course of action.
- Analytics: Businesses today gather large volumes of data, ranging from customer information to something as basic as the client location. The process of converting the data into actionable information is called analytics. Analytics software analyzes each bit of data your business gathers by filtering out the unnecessary information and using only the data that matters. However, a large amount of software products tend to focus on web analytics exclusively. Methods can range from historical to predictive and a business’ analytical requirements tend to vary based on use and application. The main factor to consider is the analytical model you want to use, such as regression or clustering and the primary channel / location of your data sets. Additionally, there are numerous subcategories of analytics, including, but not limited to, predictive analytics.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI is becoming an integral part of modern business. Artificial Intelligence is a sophisticated machine-driven process aimed to arrive at “smart” decisions based on the interpretation of complex data sets, often used for analytical processes. Business-focused AI solutions tend to bridge the gap between AI and BI, using the analytics generated by AI tools to deliver information that is actionable and insightful.
- Big Data: Big data is continuously gaining importance in the business world. Businesses today, regardless of their scale and industry, collect large volumes of data about key processes and stakeholders with the view to generating actionable insights. Big data solutions in analytics and intelligence software enable you to organize the data in an effective and streamlined manner, making it easier to process, analyze and understand.
- Business Intelligence (BI): Every business gathers some raw data. Business intelligence (BI) is the process of converting that data into information the business can use for decisions making purposes. BI solutions provide you insights into business performance, commonly focused on measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Using BI tools, you can get a clear picture of your business performance and make tweaks to your current campaigns and processes. The BI solutions in the analytics and intelligence segment aim to give you a competitive edge in the market.
- Data Mining: Data mining is the process of using historical or large amounts of data to generate new information and insights. Data mining solutions allow you to use diverse datasets gathered from different sources to extract new learnings and make smarter decisions.
- Mobile Analytics: An ever-increasing number of consumers today use mobile devices to search for products and services on the web. Businesses have to gather data about their ‘mobile consumers’, leading to the need for specific mobile analytics. Mobile analytics’ solutions enable businesses to gather data about mobile customers / users using their platform or mobile app to generate reports and track KPIs. Solutions often highlight the key trends and changes in performance indicators that can help better cater to target audiences.
- Predictive Analytics: The data your business gathers about current performance can be used for making predictions about the future. This is where predictive analytics solutions come into play. Combining AI, BI, machine learning, big data, data mining and modeling, these solutions enable you to use data you have collected about your business and customers to forecast future performance.
- Reporting Dashboard: Reporting dashboards consolidate and organize data generated from different analytics solutions in one centralized system. You can view key information about your business performance on a clutter-free and customizable dashboard, allowing you to keep the most important information always in view.
Latest User Reviews in Analytics & Intelligence
Integrator
Olena Sherbinin, Data Architect - University of Pittsburgh - School of Information Sciences
"Easy to use data integration service"
mailspice analytics
Steffen Busch, Consultant - Summit Sportmarketing
"Mailspice for customer centric steering "
Google Analytics
Monica Cherry, Administrator - Self-Employed
"very useful tool"
i really like all the data that it provides and how I can break it down by specific a...
SEOCrawler
Clayton Johnson, SEO Expert - Clayton Johnson SEO
"Excellent"
I like the entire suite of tools available. I can keep track of linking, do SEO audit...
