Turn Data Into Actionable Insights

Businesses must toe the fine line between making change and getting overwhelmed by information. Actionable insights help lead you to make smarter decisions while analyzing large amounts of data for you. Instead of trying to solve everything, you create a targeted set of analytical questions for a specific data set that leads to insights that will enable your business to take action. A data-driven approach to business insights will help your organization grow, adapt, and change in clear, observable ways. Incorporating web scraping into this process helps make your input data even stronger, therefore leading to better insights.

If you know the basics of analytics, then use the table of contents to jump ahead and discover the best ways to use web scraping to your advantage.

Table of Contents

What is Actionable Analytics?

Actionable Analytics is the process of analyzing relevant data in context to a specific need and running that data through various tools to generate specific insights that advocate for specific actions. The approach of actionable analytics is important because instead of merely collecting data, you are using it with a designated goal in mind and therefore reanalyzing previously collected data through the lens of your goal, helping you stay focused and concise. You can perform these tasks manually or automatically with actionable google analytics. The process of analysis combined with clear, actionable steps helps retailers and other businesses understand and improve based on customer sentiment.

Benefits of Actionable Data Analytics

Actionable data analytics gives you clear steps towards growth. Foremost is that the results lead you to specific actions to take next instead of generic insights. Below are more reasons why you should invest in performing analytics.

Seamless workflow

Often, businesses or online sellers use various programs to collect data and analyze it. This creates a fractured workflow since you are constantly jumping between programs and formats. Other than being annoying, these shifts also cause you to be less productive and more prone to errors. By using google analytics actionable insights or other analytics programs, you can create a seamless workflow where all your analyzing, insights, and future actions can take place within the same interface. This saves you time, money, energy, and also works better for teams since your communication is limited to one platform. These other data analysis tools help you find success.

Build brand loyalty

Because these programs give you action-based insights, you get real-time analysis that keeps you ahead of the competition. Some of the most useful data for insight is customer sentiment data which analyzes how customers feel about a certain aspect of a product or process (ex. Design, shipping, utility, etc). With this information, you can make tangible improvements. If many customers are consistently pointing out a design flaw, then that is clearly something that can be fixed in order to appeal to more people and build brand loyalty. While you can always read through reviews and comments without extracting them with web scraping, the patterns are much more visible with the help of extraction and analysis.

Enhance team focus

Data can be messy. With lots of data points to input and insights to discover, it is easy to be overwhelmed by information. Ultimately, people are the best at generating unique insights that improve your business. However, when employees are tasked with each step of the data collection and analysis process, they can tire before it is even time to glean insight. When you employ the help of web scrapers to extract and analyze data, you help your team reserve brainpower for the moments it matters most. Instead of tiring out your team with work that can be automated, let the automatic process give them the tools they need to use their critical thinking skills to make the best decisions.

Turning Actionable Data Into Insights

While analytics programs generate insights, you must also take time to understand the purpose of the analysis beforehand. Below are different ways you can brainstorm before performing actionable web analytics to better understand the insights and how to ultimately take action.

Ask the right questions

You can’t get the right answers with the wrong questions. In order to fully reap the benefits of actionable insights, the insights must be answers to relevant questions. Before you go from data to insights, you and your team must clearly define the goal of the analysis and what kinds of insights you are seeking. Only once you know what kind of insights you need are you able to input data sets that help you get closer to taking the next step.

Segmentation

In addition to asking the right questions, you must also be using the right part of your customer base for analysis. Segmentation is when you study different demographics of customers separately. When combined into one large group, your analysis will be more vague and your insights less targeted. In order to get the most profit or positive change out of each insight, you must create specific goals for each target audience and apply them accordingly. Segmentation helps you avoid accidentally turning customers away by making decisions contrary to their specific needs.

Create an optimization plan

Creating an optimization plan before you start, similar to asking the right questions, is an important tool for defining the goals of analysis and communicating those goals to your team. To make an effective optimization plan, you must define the problem, measure data and conduct basic analysis, analyze patterns, improve based on insights, and control the change by monitoring.

Once you’ve completed all these steps, you and your team will be in a better position to understand insights, spot any glaring problems, which results in specific insights. This is more useful than simply moving straight to analyzing because you are less likely to recognize abnormalities or odd patterns if you don’t try to spot them beforehand.

Integrate Data Sources with Web Scraping

Web scraping is the automatic process of extracting information from web pages and downloading it into a shareable format. While this work can be done manually, it takes lots of time and money. With a web scraping tool, you can collect tons of data in a matter of minutes. Below are different tips for using scraping to collect and supplement data during actionable analytics.

eCommerce

For those selling and trading on eCommerce sites, these sites are home to lots of data. You can scrape product information, reviews, trending products, prices, and much more. By inputting this data for actionable insights, you can easily compare yourself with the competition and anticipate how to edge them out. Lots of these sites, such as Amazon, have their own analytics tools you can use with web scraping for optimal results.

Scrape other analytics programs

As I just said, lots of eCommerce sites have their own analytics tools. By running your analysis through a variety of tools, on a variety of platforms, you can truly assess the success and accuracy of your insights. For sellers who work on multiple platforms, you know how different each site’s approach is to analytics and selling. Using a scraper to organize all these insights in one place helps you notice overarching patterns. Sometimes insights that work on eBay may not crossover to Amazon and vice versa. Running your insights through a particular program helps you from implementing actions where they aren’t needed, or even might make matters worse. Instead of becoming too reliant on any specific analytics program, web scraping becomes an essential tool for verifying the analytics’ results.

Custom scraping solution

Even with lots of data available on public webpages, you may still find yourself in need of more information that is specific to the goals you set before starting the analytics process. Your project might require a custom scraping solution. Custom solutions are built in collaboration with the Scraping Robot team, who ensures that all security rules are followed and that the scraper meets your specific needs. You also won’t need to manage proxies or worry about development. With a custom scraper, you can scrape by the millions (or even billions) while paying less per scrape than with the modules. If this sounds like the right solution for you, contact us to get started.

Conclusion

With lots of data available, it can be tempting to conduct generic analysis. But when you take the time to set specific goals for data analysis and turn data into actionable insights, you will take your business to the next level. Conducting analysis for specific purposes generates specific insights that can be applied to a target audience or a specific product. Data collection and integration into your strategy is a worthwhile investment.

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Hannah Benson