Introduction
Data analytics is the process of transforming raw data into useful statistics, insights, and explanations by arranging it correctly, explaining it, making it presentable, and finding a conclusion from that data.
There are many tools to assist in making data-drive decisions and choosing the right tool is always a challenge for many business owners and marketers.
To make the most out of the infinite number of data analytics tools out there, I will explore some of my favorite and top data analytics tools that has helped me make smarter, more informed business decisions while minimizing cost and boosting profits.
Top Data Analytics Tools
1) Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the most powerful free tool I have utilized to track user behavior and metrics on my website. With a huge spectrum of metrics to analyze and explore, you can understand how people interact with your website and how you can make changes to increase your traffic, sales, conversions, or downloads.
Here are some of the main reasons why I love Google Analytics – you can track which channels your users are coming from, which landing page gets the most traffic, how many visitors you have, how they found you, the number of views a page receives, and what the demographics of your audience looks like.
Although it takes a bit of time to get set up, there are plenty of online tutorials and resources to guide you through the process. Once you get Google Analytics connected to your site, you can head to the Google Analytics dashboard and start checking things out. It can’t go back in time, though, so you will have to wait for data to gather.
Google Analytics can free you from relying on gut checks and intuition and instead tell you what pages and which content hit the mark or fall short. In this way, you can make informed choices.
2) Google Sheets/Microsoft Excel
One of the main tools I always use to calculate and keep track of my budget, revenue, acquisitions, campaign metrics, ROI/ROAS, and more. Google sheets and excel are pretty much the same in the terms of formulas and calculations and many of their features of them are same. They both have data in the form of a table (rows and columns). The biggest difference between excel and google sheets is that google sheets can be shared with other users by providing them a link to give them permission to read or edit the sheet at once while in excel only one person can edit the file at a time.
One of the main advantages of Google sheets is the ease of collaboration. You can pretty much work with your team in creating something worthwhile on one sheet at the same time, and all of the changes autosave. Multiple people can work simultaneously, which makes collaboration easier. Microsoft Excel, on the other hand, allows you to track changes in excel, but Google sheets let you edit the sheet simultaneously.
3) Smartsheet
Similar to Google Sheets and Excel, Smartsheet is one of the best client facing tools that allow you to give permission to other users to see specific columns, tabs, and pages.
Smartsheet makes spreadsheet data more dynamic for people who aren’t experts in Excel. Each row or column can contain a drop-down menu of custom values, a contact list, a date, a checkbox, a symbol, or several other entities.
4) SuperMetrics
When I first started at Sanguine Biosciences and we were in startup phase – all of my data was housed in Google Sheets and most of my work was very manual and piecemeal because I have to input all of my ad data campaign from Facebook, Instagram, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. into Google Sheets.
SuperMetrics was my main solution of aggregating all of this data and connecting it into one place.
