Analytics is the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data.
Analytics is similar to data mining and typically involves looking for patterns such as the following:
- Certain classes of users performing certain actions. For example, perhaps a specific demographic group makes more in-app purchases in a mobile game.
- Certain data is requested at various times. For example, before a new movie is released in theaters, users stream previous or similar movies.
- Customers who view or purchase one type of item subsequently purchase related items (sign in to Amazon for endless examples of this).
Analytics involve searching through large quantities of data to look for common threads which can then be used for a variety of purposes from predicting future customer behavior (sales), to developing new products that customers may want, to offering new services or new ways of paying for or acquiring digital content.
