Types of Analytics

Like all great things, there are many flavors of analytics. There is a general trend of complexity, where each level of analytics builds on the previous ones. So lets start with the basics.

Reporting analytics is about the simplest form of analytics. People generate reports all the time in all sorts of business. You can tally sales by region, losses by credit vintage, fraud by zipcode, and so on. There is an old adage that you can't fix something if you can't measure it. Reporting analytics is exactly that - measurement.

In the online world, Google analytics is one of the most common reporting analytics systems. This system tracks page traffic, conversions, keyword and ad performance. In the hands of a sophisticated marketer, tools like this are useful in fine tuning marketing campaigns.

But reporting analytics is such entry-level, that many purists don't even like to use the word "analytics" in the same sentence as "reports". I've had people tell me that they have fully implemented analytics, just to find out that all they have done is put in Google analytics. To some extent Google has co-opted "analytics" in the online world. If only they'd called it Google Reporting, alot of us would be more content.

In the offline market world, reporting systems were built starting in the 1960's. Essentially as soon as people could put enough data, like mailing lists, into computers, they created reports as their first step down the analytic journey. Reporting systems are still an important component of any analytics platform today, and there are very sophisticated tools that bleed into data visualization.

However, 99% of reports are never looked at. Relying on a human in the loop to digest the reports and make adjustments to campaigns is well proven to be unreliable, error-prone, and inefficient. This was realized in the offline world 40 years ago, and resulted in the development of the next stage of analytics...