There is no one type of retail analytics. There are many forms in the 21st century. Meet them!
Both retail analytics and DSD have come a long way in recent years. In the past, if we wanted to know the opinions of our customers about the store or the reasons that led them to buy in it, we could only ask them through some type of market research.
We had to take surveys in person or by email or wait to call them and ask how their shopping experience was.
Luckily, we are past the days of having to consult our consumers while they were shopping to find out what they thought and felt about that shopping experience. Of course, stopping them at this time also meant stopping the purchase process and this could affect its outcome.
Today, we have different types of analytics to analyze the information from our store. We show you what they are:
1. Descriptive analytics
Descriptive analytics provides businesses with a summary of the performance of all business activities. To name a few, we can know the registration of transactions, inventory changes and the success of applied promotions. This type of retail analytics is not new.
Merchants have used descriptive analytics to analyze direct contact campaigns to determine response rate, costs per drive, and conversion rate.
However, descriptive analytics has evolved thanks to the arrival of Big Data.
Merchants using website monitoring can, among other things, determine how many users visited the site, how many pages were browsed, how long they stayed on them, which links were clicked on and whether they led the user to purchase.
2. Diagnostic analysis
As the analytical descriptive, analytical, diagnostic takes into account the past performance of the trade. However, this type is also taken into consideration the context for analyzing the information.
This way, you can find some trends or causal relationships between the variables and the results. This analytical provides a understanding probabilistic on the why of the results obtained.
3. Predictive analytics
The predictive analytics allows businesses to anticipate the trends and behaviors of buyers based on the historical relations between the variables previously discovered by the analytical diagnosis.
The analytical system of DSD applies different statistical methods, such as the data mining, a volume of information to predict certain trends. Of course, there is always an element of uncertainty to the predictions and predictive analytics is no exception.
For this reason, we must verify the origin of the information, if it is representative of consumers, if there are outliers within the data thrown in. We also need to know what assumptions have been made and what conditions may arise that would these assumptions.
4. Analytical prescriptive
The analytical prescriptive allows businesses to make smooth adjustments anticipating possible changes in the desires of the consumers, demand, shocks offer and other aspects.
For example, movie theaters, airlines, and cruise ships can change their prices to accommodate the changes that you anticipate in the demand.
Apply the best analytics to your store today
We already know about the importance of collecting information of our store to optimize their processes. Now we also know the different types of analytics that we can use to achieve it.
Needless to say, the 4 are easily combinable and cannot be cancelled. The more information you collect from our store and to better analyze, the better will be your performance.
