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Data analytics

Data analytics is the work of turning data into answers: asking a question, cleaning the data, running the numbers, and explaining what happened, why, and what to do next.

Select any words here to ask your Maestro about them.

Your store's conversion rate rose from 3.2% in Q2 to 3.8% in Q3. Your manager asks how each device did. What do you find?

An online store with 100,000 visits each quarter. Example data.

What it is: the work of turning data into answers: asking a good question, gathering and cleaning the data (often with SQL or Excel), calculating, charting, and explaining what it means. Its results end up in dashboards and KPIs.

What matters most: knowing what's behind a number before you explain it: where it came from, what it counts and what it leaves out. Correlation doesn't prove causation, and a single number rarely says why it moved.

Common tools: Excel, SQL, Power BI, Python with pandas and, more and more, AI assistants that write the queries. Checking what they give you is still your job.

How it's used

Four types of analytics

An online store's sales

  1. Descriptive: what happened? March sales droppedDashboards and reports: most of the work.
  2. marked: Diagnostic: why? Only first-time orders dropped, not repeat onesSplitting the number by groups is the main tool.
  3. Predictive: what will happen? How much we'll sell in AprilModels like regression.
  4. Prescriptive: what should we do? How much to spend on ads, and on which campaignIt pairs a prediction with a decision.
Each type builds on the one before: you can't explain or predict what you didn't measure well.

When to look closer

Conversion jumped with the redesign

March: the new site launches

  1. marked: Conversion: 3.2% in February, 4.1% in March

Conversion jumped from 3.2% to 4.1% the month of the redesign. What do you check before crediting it?

Ask your Maestro about Data analytics

It answers from the free course page closest to this word, the way it answers while you study.

Example

You: What does "Data analytics" mean, in plain words?

Your Maestro: I'll explain it with a case of yours: it sticks better than a definition. Which question at work would you answer with data if you had the time?

Asking about: Answers from the page "Why does my running total in SQL repeat numbers?"

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Related terms

  • KPI (key performance indicator)

    A KPI is a number a team tracks to know whether it's doing well at what matters most, like monthly sales or orders delivered on time. It only works if it's well defined, so two people who calculate it get the same answer.

  • Dashboard

    A dashboard puts the few numbers someone checks often to make a decision on one screen, each next to its goal or its trend.

  • SQL

    SQL is the language for asking a database for data: which columns, from which table, which rows and how to summarize them. You get a table back.

  • Power BI

    Power BI is Microsoft's tool for connecting data from several sources and building interactive reports and dashboards your team opens online.

The whole glossary