Many third party data analysis software packages, while extremely sophisticated, are very expensive and often out of the reach of SMEs. But not all.
The web, as ever, is our savior and there are many tools out there that can provide great data analysis for those on a budget so that you can grow your business and hopefully eventually afford some of the really cools stuff.
Read On:
What is data analytics?
Data gathering and the law
How to collect data
So what tools are available to you on the open market?
Google Analytics
The daddy of free online data analysis, Google Analytics is probably the one piece of data fiddling kit that any e-tailer is familiar with. Offering insight into everything from simple clicks on your site to advertising reports, campaign management, advanced segmentation, audience analytics and much, much more.
The company has added in social media tracking too and it now all works with mobile devices as well as more traditional online access kit. The premium version offers even more and it is really a very sophisticated piece of data analysis kit.
Ometria
Using the snappy slogan “I’ve got 99 problems, but e-commerce analytics ain’t one”, Ometria is a data analytics company set up specifically to offer products and services to all sizes of businesses, including SMEs.
Its USP is that it has been effectively designed by retailers from the ground up so delivers the kind of functionality that e-tailers need and want.
It claims to be scalable and easy to use and offers great visualization tools that make data representation clear and easy. It also prides itself on being able to offer both indepth analytics to a fairly granular level, as well as the ability to provide a snapshot as needed.
It is quick to set up – the company claims in as little as five minutes it can be live – and can import all your historical data too so that you can paint an accurate image of customer behavior pretty much from the off.
Swipely
Swipely is a service that sells payments, analytics, and marketing tools to local merchants. It has since been rolled out to serve online SMEs too.
The online software works with point-of-sale systems and terminals used by independent businesses including restaurants, salons, boutiques, grocers and other retailers without additional hardware.M erchants in the Swipely network use the product to interact with customer spending, social media, and other data.
Its Winter 2013 release added new features such as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool to keep track of customers, Swipely Heat Map to monitor a merchant’s hourly sales performance, and a partnership with American Express that provides next-day funding on American Express transactions.
The upgrade also tied into social and illustrates to merchants how weather, Facebook posts, and other factors impact their customers’ buying patterns.
Tableau
The company was set up by a Harvard Professor and his PhD student in Seattle in the early 2000s to make data easy to visual and therefore understandable by everyone.
The company has since expanded its offering to offer a range of products that essentially go from simple and basic (Tableau Desktop), through a mid-tier (Tableau Online) to sophisticated enterprise grade (Tableau Server).
Each comes at a price, but offers a range of interesting data visualization tools that help turn your numerical and statistical data into stuff you can use. And it looks pretty too.
Kaggle
Where Google Analytics lets you pick to pieces what is going on with and around your site and your campaigns, Kaggle is an affordable predictive analytics tool. It works by companies and researchers posting their data on the site and statisticians and data miners from all over the world compete to produce the best models.
This crowdsourcing approach relies on the fact that there are countless strategies that can be applied to any predictive modelling task and it is impossible to know at the outset which technique or analyst will be most effective.
With some 95,000 data scientists from all over the world working on it, Kaggle has been used by everyone from Deloittes to NASA.
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