In order to make better decisions to improve performance in key business competencies, analytics must be used. Davenport, Harris, and Morison define being analytical by using analysis, data, and systematic reasoning to make decisions. They also believe that for too long managers have made important decisions based on their “gut feeling” and intuition rather than analytical statistics. Some benefits of making decisions on sound analytics are: knowing what’s really working, cutting costs and improving efficiencies, managing risk, anticipating changes in market conditions, and creating a basis for improving decisions over time.
Analytical DELTA
You can use five factors outlined by the authors that will determine your business’ success with analytics. The success factors are grouped into the acronym DELTA, the Greek word for “change” because when used altogether, they can change your business.
Data – Before you can make any analytical decisions, you must have data to base your decision off of. There are very important aspects of your data that you need to know to fully understand it. How do you structure and organize the data you collect? How do you exploit unique data that no one else has? Lastly, how do you govern your data and pull it all together to make sound decisions?
Enterprise – In order to be able to have the vision of how analytics can help your company, managers must have a holistic view of the entire enterprise. Using a holistic approach will keep managers from being shallow-minded enough to make assumptions about data to better serve their department’s needs. Using analytics is about increasing the efficiencies of your entire enterprise.
Leadership – The authors of this book claim leadership is the most significant aspect of the 5 DELTA. Leaders can define an organization’s analytical culture, and they can set in motion people, money and time on developing analytical initiatives.
Targets – Your Company needs to define where your analytical efforts will bring the most benefit given the resources allocated to it. You need to aim at an area where analytics can make a difference in business performance, competitiveness, and profitability. Also, executive management should be behind the targeted initiative, and the target should have specific success metrics to gauge progress.
Analysts – The analytical oriented employees, who make an organization’s day-to-day work possible, are critical to success. It is important to keep challenging analysts by varying their work to continually update their skills.
Using analytics
There are numerous ways that Rocket Clicks embeds analytics in our business processes. It starts out with data. We use many tools in our daily work that guide our decisions for our clients. Whether we’re monitoring Google’s Adwords or Analytics, SEO for Firefox, or any other data gathering web tool – we are able to analyze the data, make smarter decisions, and get better results for our clients. Rocket Clicks also keeps every analyst’s mind sharp by continually training our employees. We have weekly training sessions that cover a broad array of topics, and we have department-wide best practice training sessions that take a deep dive into our department’s analytical thoughts on current features.
The secrets to Rocket Clicks’ analytical success
You didn’t think we’d actually tell you, did you?
Nick Haertel
Paid Search Analyst
