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Big Data And Its Impact On Your Website

2014-08-19by Tristan Anwyn

Is it time to look at how big data and your website are getting along?

Big data is still a popular buzzword and it's easy to see why - properly used, big data can offer useful insights for any business.

As big data grows and matures, businesses are realizing more and more that big data is an umbrella term for data from any sources, that can be analyzed in any number of ways, to get the results that are most useful for the business in question. 

One of the intersections your business needs to be mindful of is that between big data and your business website.

Your website can be a valuable source of big data; as big data technology changes, it's worth your time to analyze how your website generates and uses big data, and whether it's time to do that differently.

 

Big Data Is Always Changing

As stated in the article "Extremely Cool Big Data, for People and Machines", the amount of big data being generated and stored is always increasing.

Even small businesses are now capable of harvesting and working with huge data sets, and in response to that more and more vendors are offering big data solutions, including cloud-based options and analytical tools. With so much more available, it's a good time to assess how big data is working when it comes to your website.

 

Your Website - Source of Big Data

Web analytics are a rich source of big data that can be mined for valuable insights about how your customers are behaving on your site.

Everything from click through rates to analyzing where your traffic comes from to seeing how long your customers stay on each page is available using website analytics. 

The more you can see of how your customers behave on your site, the more insight you can gain into what is making them stay on your site - and what is making them leave.

By analyzing their behavior you can get a good feel for what is attracting and keeping customers, and make sure you update your website to offer more of that.

 

Evaluating How You Harvest and Analyze Website Data

One of the biggest changes for small businesses is how data is harvested and analyzed.

As well as the website analysis tools that come with your hosting package, you can also make use of the popular Google Analytics to gain more insight into your visitors' behavior. 

It doesn't stop there.

Big name such as Amazon and Google are offering big data analysis tools for data from any source, including your website. If you're serious about big data, it might be time to look into whether a tool such as Amazon Web Services or Google's Big Query can help you dig for deeper insights.

 

Assessing Your Current System's Fitness for Big Data

One of the challenges when it comes to big data is fitting it into your existing system.

Perhaps you already have a business intelligence system, but don't find it up to scratch when it comes to fast and accurate big data analysis. Or perhaps the results aren't as easy to read as they could be. 

 

Harvesting your data from your website is an important first step, but it's also important to assess your current data management tools to see if they are fit for purpose.

With light and simple to use cloud-based options available, and visualization tools to make grasping the results easy, there's no need to struggle without dated systems, or pay a fortune to replace them.

 

Big data is always changing.

As well as harvesting data from your website, it's time to look anew at how you analyze that data, and how you collect it.

Your website is a valuable big data tool, so make the best of it and gain as many insights as possible.

 

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Author

Tristan Anwyn

Tristan Anwyn writes on a wide variety of topics, including social media, SEO, IT security and European businesses.

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