The Power of Big Data in the Hands of Small Businesses

You have probably heard about “big data,” but may be uncertain about what the term really means. So to begin, what is big data?

For small business owners, big data can refer to data from your website, social media profiles, digital marketing ad campaigns, client relationship manager, and more.

So what can big data do for you as a business owner? There are a myriad of potential applications for big data that will enhance your ability to understand and connect with your customers. Big data can even help you predict how your customers will act based on previous behavior, interests, demographics, and more.

Beyond that, insights from big data can improve ROI and reduce overhead by contributing to process automation, real-time campaign adjustment, goal tracking, and problem solving. In fact, there really isn’t a limit when it comes to how you can use big data to your benefit. Some applications include:

All of the applications mentioned above sound incredibly useful, and they are! However, in order to secure any of the benefits of big data for your business, you will have to first learn how to access and analyze your data. The great news is that there are free tools available that can help you do so.

As an example of one of the free tools you can use to harness big data, let’s take a look at Google Analytics, a tool for web analytics that tracks traffic to your website.

A snapshot of some of the ways you can put big data to work with Google Analytics:

• Watch real time traffic to see who is on your website right now, which pages they are viewing, what country they are in, and what traffic source led them to view your site.
• Examine audience characteristics, like which countries your users live in, what languages they speak, whether they are accessing your site from desktop or mobile, what operating system and browser they use, what their interests are, what demographic groups they belong to, and whether they are first-time or returning users.
• Determine which channels drive traffic to your site. For example, what proportions of your users visit your site directly, from organic search, from paid search, from display, and from referrals?
• Understand users’ behavior on site, including which pages they view, how long they spend on a page, bounce rates, and on which pages they are most likely to drop out of the acquisition funnel.
• Set goal actions or events, such as making a purchase, subscribing, downloading a particular file, or viewing a certain number of pages.
• Track total sales, performance of particular products, or other conversion metrics.
• Conduct A/B and multivariate testing to optimize performance of your ads and pages.

Other tools that may be useful for your business include Facebook Insights, Google AdWords, Microsoft Clarity, and tools included in your CRM software.

Data is everywhere – don’t miss out on the opportunity to put the insights it can give you to use for your business.

Xponent21 engineers digital experiences that delight visitors, attract new leads to your business, and increase online conversion rates. Explore our capabilities. To learn more about how to use big data to maximize the conversions generated by your website and digital marketing, get in touch with us.