You keep hearing these words, and people keep saying that it is important to pay attention and do these actions. In a nutshell, data is the collected information; analytics understands that information and insights are what you gain after understanding what it means for your company.

What is Data?

Think of your personal mobile experience. When you download an app, you allow it to gather information from your phone: location, reading your texts, your browser history, personal information, among other things depending on the app. You’ve probably allowed it to send you to push notifications. Well, that app is gathering all the data it can from you as a consumer. It is looking at you whether you use the app or not. And it sends that information back to the app.

Data is all the compiled information whether you give it away, through your user behavior, or gathered by third parties.  Data is like a big box that people keep throwing their info too. There’s no rhyme or reason to it…yet.

What is Analytics?

Now the app has all this information about you. What happens? With the help of technology and tools as Azure’s Insights and Analytics, the app will separate your information into smaller groups.

Let’s say it was an app for a restaurant. Now the owner of the app will be able to see your behavior as a customer. Instead of simple pizza and wings purchase during certain Sundays of the year, the analytics, through the data gathered by your phone usage, will tell the app owner that on NFL Sundays when the New York Giants play, there’s a higher chance of you buying pizza and wings between noon and 3 p.m.

Thanks to Azure tools, it is now possible to understand how and why you behave as a consumer.

What is Insights?

Now that the app owner understands your spending habits, it can tailor offers to you and other customers with similar behaviors. Instead of a marketing campaign for a big game, the app will provide an offer to you during NFL Sundays and have you as a repeat customer.

Insight is what is learned and what will improve your business. Your business will know better, so you’ll be able to work better.

A better understanding

Data, analytics, and insights work together to understand better how your customer and client use your product or service. Insights and analytics depend on each other and on data to make a vast amount of information understandable. Most importantly, it takes that information and puts it to work for your business, predicting how your customers will behave. And with management tools, like Azure’s Insights & Analytics, it’s better than before.

As the market continues to move to mobile, the amount of data available will continue to grow. It’ll help better understand consumer and client behaviors without disrupting their experiences. All that data contains the information you need to optimize your sales, services, and how your company could improve. The best way to improve your business and ensure you’ll have a better marketing strategy is through data, analytics, and insights.