Advanced Analytics: Benefits, Techniques & Examples

Technology has come a long way to help businesses operate at optimum levels with access to deep insights. Advanced analytics exists at the pinnacle of these capabilities to examine data autonomously or semi-autonomously.

We’re going to dive into advanced analytics techniques and how advanced analytics tools can position your business for ultimate success.

Coming Up

What is Advanced Analytics?

What is Advanced Analytics vs Business Intelligence?

Why are Advanced Analytics Important?

What are the Benefits of Advanced Analytics?

What are Advanced Analytics Techniques?

What are Use Cases and Examples of Advanced Analytics?

How to Choose Advanced Analytics Tools?

Closing Thoughts

What is Advanced Analytics?

Advanced analytics is the combination of various data analysis techniques, like predictive modeling and machine learning. Businesses use advanced analytics to enhance their decision making abilities, detect fraud, develop marketing and sales tactics, and more.

Driven by data science, advanced analytics takes business intelligence (BI) to the next level with the ability to anticipate future events and the probability to forecast future trends. With forward-looking capabilities, businesses can make wise choices today in an effort to positively impact tomorrow.

What is Advanced Analytics vs Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence and advanced analytics are not the same concept. However, they are related.

Both disciplines use data analytics techniques, including data visualization, statistical analysis, reporting and data mining. Yet, business intelligence is traditionally focused on using this analysis to understand past and present data to understand how a business is performing presently. This is called descriptive analytics.

Alternatively, advanced analytics uses machine learning, along with the data analysis techniques of descriptive analytics, to predict the future. It covers predictive and prescriptive analytics to offer insights as to what course of action a business should take now to improve what’s next.

Why are Advanced Analytics Important?

If you had a crystal ball that could accurately predict the future for your business, wouldn’t you want to look into it?

Advanced analytics is like a crystal ball that’s backed by math and algorithms, rather than magic. Its concrete findings predict with great accuracy what you can expect based on data.

With the knowledge of what’s likely to happen in the future, businesses gain a significant strategic advantage. They can use this insight to determine new business opportunities and innovations.

In the same vein, they can leverage the data to better understand customer behavior to maximize sales and retention, while also providing employees with what they need to remain with the company. All of these benefits work to save the business money and maximize revenue.

Thanks to the advent of automation software that works out-of-the-box, any business can leverage the assistance of advanced analytics, even without any IT team available to assist.

What are the Benefits of Advanced Analytics?

Making the unknown known is of course advantageous in plenty of ways, especially when it comes to businesses operating in competitive environments. Let’s review some of the key benefits of using advanced analytics.

1. Accurate Predictions

Given the nature of machine learning, advanced analytics increase in accuracy with more usage as datasets grow. Businesses can function with confidence about future outcomes with a thorough understanding of customer preferences and market trends. This leads to a significant competitive advantage.

2. Problem Resolution

Companies are better equipped to resolve challenges because they understand the likelihood of scenarios occurring along with how a course of action could impact outcomes. This way, they can choose the best solution to move forward with.

3. Risk Reduction

Advanced analytics help see into the future, so businesses can act today to reduce potential risks.

4. Agility Improvement

Businesses have a plan of action in place and greater certainty. As a result, they can operate with improved agility and be proactive rather than reactive.

5. Visibility Enhancement

Data analytics tools that provide advanced analytics capabilities also improve the company’s visibility and internal control. With advanced analytics occurring within a unified system, data is no longer siloed. Stakeholders and executives gain access to dashboards and reports to make informed decisions in real-time.

What are Advanced Analytics Techniques?

We’ve touched on predictive, prescriptive, and descriptive data analysis within this article, but we have yet to really dive into the details of advanced analytics techniques and why they matter. Now, it’s time to share what these various advanced analytics techniques have to offer:

1. Descriptive Modeling

Descriptive modeling is a mathematical application to uncover the relationship between real-world events and the factors responsible for them. In business, descriptive modeling is useful to optimize advertising and marketing campaigns by better understanding customer behavior and intent.

2. Predictive Analytics

This is where advanced analytics really shines and stands apart from traditional business intelligence. With the aid of machine learning and artificial intelligence, predictive analytics explains what is likely to occur in the future.

It leverages the data you already have in existence, from the past and present, to predict future outcomes and trends. With predictive analytics as part of your toolbelt, you can utilize your previous outcomes to improve future scenarios and take the best course of action to reduce risk, decrease costs, and maximize profits.

3. Big Data Analytics

There’s no denying that the speed and volume of data entering businesses grows with each passing day. Rather than being overwhelmed by the data, you can use automation software to get the most from it to improve decision making and business operations.

Big data analytics is the process of applying advanced analytics techniques, like clustering and data mining, to discover patterns and trends from the enormous amount of data collected. Specialized cloud-based software can collect, combine, and calculate raw data for analysis and processing, without the need for data scientists and dedicated IT teams.

What are Use Cases and Examples of Advanced Analytics?

Advanced analytics can seem hard to grasp until you can see advanced analytics examples in action. Here are a few ways in which advanced analytics can be applied on an everyday basis:

1. Fraud Detection

In finance and banking especially, fraud is ubiquitous, unfortunately. The good news is that advanced analytics can help decrease fraud risk. Predictive detection and robotic process automation (RPA) can be used to flag transactions that could be fraud as soon as they occur. This helps businesses stop fraud in its tracks.

2. Growth Opportunities

Knowing where to invest resources, including time and money, is a key to business growth and success. Advanced analytics can recognize patterns in big data to aid in spotting areas for new growth potential.

3. Marketing Strategies

Marketers can use marketing-mix modeling (MMM) to model sales drivers and external variables to optimize short and long-term strategies. By doing so, they can assess their investments and the return on investments to determine what campaigns to put into play.

How to Choose Advanced Analytics Tools?

Businesses are investing in advanced analytics tools because of the myriad of benefits that come along with transforming raw data into advanced insights. When browsing options, keep in mind the following considerations:

1. Business Goals

The advanced analytics software you choose should be aligned with business goals. By defining your business objectives, you can ensure that the analytics platform supports them by answering key questions with data and reporting features.

2. Pricing

Money talks. Be sure to assess the costs of analytics solutions. It may be optimal to select an automation tool that not only provides advanced analytics, but also aids in additional solutions like process automation, regulatory reporting, and other key functions.

3. Integration

Chances are, you already are using multiple different software in your organization, which surely hold data. To not lose out on the data you have and the investments of your software, find an advanced analytics solution that integrates with your existing tech stack.

Closing Thoughts

Advanced analytics transform how businesses can take action today to affect their present and future. With advanced analytics, businesses can make data-driven informed decisions, better understand customers and employees, and optimize key business functions.

Nowadays, there’s no need to have to hire robust data science and IT teams to gain these benefits. Instead, you can leverage automation software that is equipped with advanced analytics functionality and works as a no-code, out-of-the-box solution. Business insights can be at your fingertips with no extra effort, immediately!