In January we launched our new analytics platform, and if I am being totally honest we were probably stretching the use of the word ‘analytics’ prior to this. The reality was that we had a great reporting platform, but that was it.
If you’ve been a customer or partner of Purple for a while you will know that there were around 40 great reports in our system that gave some key insights into what was happening in your physical environment.
The problem with reports is that they often create as many questions as they answer. I’m sure you’ll have looked at some data from a report in the past and had the ‘wow, I didn’t know that, how interesting’ moment, but then immediately thought ‘but why is that?’.
You now know that Monday has a much higher dwell time than any other day of the week. But that’s it. Most reporting systems leave you hanging there.
I want to introduce you to a number I had never heard of before – Quintillion. It is a number with six groups of three numbers, which is very long. The reason I now know this number is because within our new analytics platform there are 48 Quintillion different ways of viewing your data. To be precise, that is 48,171,459,761,897,500,000.
Now, I’m not sure if you spent your entire life slicing and dicing all that you’d ever get to the end, especially when we are continually adding new base reports, filters and dimensions; that number is only going to get bigger. It’s safe to say that nobody is going to use the data in that manner. What I wanted to highlight was why that number matters, and how it helps answer the questions data constantly throws at you.
I’ll pick up where most reporting systems leave you hanging. So, you’ve just had the aha! moment and then comes the why? Now you can get to the why behind it. You can keep on slicing and dicing to see whether age, gender, travel distance, weather or some other factor is causing that extra dwell time on a Monday.
Let’s assume you’ve got to some slices of data that you now believe are key KPIs for your business – things you want to keep a closer eye on. There are two things you can do. Firstly, you can save that version of the world, no matter how complex, into a report in your own folder structure so you can bring it up whenever you need it. You can also have it emailed to you and/or a distribution group whenever you want. Now let’s also assume that there are a bunch of factors that relate to this report, such as customer frequency, recency or something else that has a correlation, and you’d like to see them together. Easy, you can add them to a custom dashboard and have a single unified view of the data.
Our new platform allows you to quickly identify the what, but then also the why behind it; arming you with the detailed analytics and insights you need to make important decisions that will positively impact your business. Here’s a sample of our reports below.
Sometimes though you don’t know what you don’t know, y’know? Therefore you can’t ask the question of the analytics. We’ll soon have you covered there too. Our trends and insights functionality will be arriving soon and our powerful AI engine will be analyzing all of those 48 Quintillion different options to surface all of the things you should probably know, but didn’t know to ask.
Got questions? Get in touch.