How to get Automated Insights from Google Analytics

Carly Fiorina, former executive, president, and chair of Hewlett-Packard Co.

Google Analytics is one of the most popular website tracking tools and is especially important for startups and small businesses. In today’s age of data and fast experimentation. Thereby, it’s important to set it up properly. This is key to understanding the data and making the right decisions. FAST! The goal is to get automated insights from Google Analytics setup!

Data in its raw form is not of use. It’s relevant if and only if we can gather insights and take relevant action. And when it comes to actionable insights, Google Analytics has been quite lacking.

• Lots of Data Points but Few Insights: There are loads of data points, metrics and charts. This can be quite overwhelming for non-data savvy folks or the ones not familiar with the tool.
• Wrong Insights From Google Analytics: It’s quite possible, that a non-data savvy person, could interpret and make the wrong conclusions from the data. This is worse than having no data.
• Not Enough Budget: To deal with the above, not all teams can afford to have a full-fledged analyst in team or hire a GA consultant for the purpose.

Key Business Metrics

For a growing digital business, there are broadly 3 key departments

• Revenue Metrics: This is basically aspects such as AOV, Bills, Sales Mix etc. Basically, gives an idea of the business in terms
  • AOV
  • Net Margins
  • Sales Mix and so on …

• Marketing: The other key aspect is the efficiency of different marketing channels, what’s working and what’s not.
  • ATC (Add to Carts)
  • Conversions
  • CAC and so on …

• Product Analytics: The user behaviour and different cohorts in terms of
  • Retention
  • Buying patterns
  • App usage patterns and so on …

All these should be straightforward to create given the consistent definitions over time and their importance in terms of business outcomes. Despite this, getting and setting up the system to generate these metrics takes time and needs an experienced hand.

21st Century Analytics/Business Intelligence

All the above problems combined with development and progress in AI/ML have helped bridge the gap in terms of tooling. So, given the developments, there is no need to just rely on the existing Google Analytics dashboard and it’s time to go beyond it. Not only can you compute the key metrics but also generate insights based on them.

It’s time to make the business intelligent. There has been a growth of explainable and intelligent BI that can make sense of your business data, ingest it and generate actionable insights out of them.

Every business has the following requirements from its BI and analyst team

• Clear Actionable Insights
• Consistent Reports
• And most importantly accuracy in analysis and number crunching

An intelligent BI engine should be able to generate these insights from the existing data sources. Being a machine, report generation is automatic and can be scheduled. The engine doesn’t suffer from tiredness or fatigue as a human.

Enter Decidable

Decidable is a natural language story engine that translates complex data into plain English data stories. Simply plug in your Google Analytics and let our AI work its magic. No more complex graphs. Just automatically generated insights in plain English that let you know exactly what’s happening in your business.

Decidable Website

Decidable is one of the 21st century BI tools that make your life easy. Powered by its natural language engine, it helps generate automatic insights in plain English. Thereby allowing the team to get relevant, consistent reports with actions in a timely manner.

Being a machine, it is more accurate, can be scheduled and works around the clock. Thereby, munging and churning out insights. So, this helps out with one of the most mind-numbing data activities.

Why a tool like this? Insights from Google Analytics

Given the proliferation of tools and AI/ML systems, why not build out your own systems to analyse these What’s the need to subscribe to a tool like this? Why not get insights from google analytics directly instead of trying to make sense of data and connect the dots?

• Fast Setup: There is no development time and fast integration means, one could be up and running in a few minutes. This will save a significant amount of development time. Thus saving money.

• Insights as Stories: The best reports tell a story and not numbers. Because stories are easier to remember and understand. They provide a clear action plan along with relevant context. Building an engine like this requires sufficient know-how and decades of past experience to replicate the tool.

• Collaborative: Modern business teams require collaboration and sync between different teams in the business. Thus, there is a need for consistent communication and uniformity in metrics/language. Something, that a tool like this allows for naturally.

Fast Moving Data Organisations

The future of business moat is moving away from pure operational/marketing or any other business function to the ability to build data as a moat for the business. Thus data and the ability to leverage it correctly is key!

• The future belongs to fast-moving, data-driven organisations.
• This requires teams to rely on superior tools in terms of consistent communication, rapid experimentation and accurate analysis.

Thus, there is a need for businesses to adopt modern tools and move away from just the basic BI in terms of dashboards and charts. A difficult to read data output is as good as not being generated.

Thus, modern age tools such as Decidable allow you to:

• Automate Reports
• No specialists needed
• Quick to setup
• Upcoming integrations with Shopify, Pinterest and other data sources.

What do you guys think, please reach out with your opinions and take on the new modern age readable BI tools?