How to get Automated Insights from Google Analytics — Startup Analytics

Abhinav Unnam
4 min readApr 3, 2022

“The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.” The goal is to get automated insights from your Google Analytics setup!

Carly Fiorina, former executive, president, and chair of Hewlett-Packard Co.

Google Analytics is one of the most popular website tracking tools and is especially important for startups and small businesses. In today’s age of data and fast experimentation. Thereby, it’s important to set it up properly. This is key to understanding the data and making the right decisions. FAST!

Data in its raw form is not of use. It’s relevant if and only if we can gather insights and take relevant action. And when it comes to actionable insights, Google Analytics has been quite lacking.

  • Lots of Data Points but Few Insights: There are loads of data points, metrics and charts. This can be quite overwhelming for non-data savvy folks or the ones not familiar with the tool.
  • Wrong Insights From Google Analytics: It’s quite possible, that a non-data savvy person, could interpret and make the wrong conclusions from the data. This is worse than having no data.
  • Not Enough Budget: To deal with the above, not all teams can afford to have a full-fledged analyst in team or hire a GA consultant for the purpose.

For a growing digital business, there are broadly 3 key departments

Revenue Metrics

This part of the business can be defined on the basis of

  • AOV
  • Net Margins
  • Growth (%) and so on

Marketing

The other key aspect is the efficiency of different marketing channels, what’s working and what’s not.

  • ATC (Add to Carts)
  • Conversions
  • CAC and so on …

Product Analytics

The user behaviour and different cohorts in terms of

  • Retention
  • Buying patterns
  • App usage patterns and so on …

All these should be straightforward to create given the consistent definitions over time and their importance in terms of business outcomes. Despite this, getting and setting up the system to generate these metrics takes time and needs an experienced hand.

All the above problems combined with development and progress in AI/ML have helped bridge the gap in terms of tooling. So, given the developments, there is no need to just rely on the existing Google Analytics dashboard and it’s time to go beyond it. Not only can you compute the key metrics but also generate insights based on them.

It’s time to make the business intelligent. There has been a growth of explainable and intelligent BI that can make sense of your business data, ingest it and generate actionable insights out of them.

Every business has the following requirements from its BI and analyst team

  • Clear Actionable Insights
  • Consistent Reports
  • And most importantly accuracy in analysis and number crunching

An intelligent BI engine should be able to generate these insights from the existing data sources. Being a machine, report generation is automatic and can be scheduled. The engine doesn’t suffer from tiredness or fatigue as a human.

Decidable is a natural language story engine that translates complex data into plain English data stories. Simply plug in your Google Analytics and let our AI work its magic. No more complex graphs. Just automatically generated insights in plain English that let you know exactly what’s happening in your business.

Decidable

Decidable is one of the 21st century BI tools that make your life easy. Powered by its natural language engine, it helps generate automatic insights in plain English. Thereby allowing the team to get relevant, consistent reports with actions in a timely manner.

Being a machine, it is more accurate, can be scheduled and works around the clock. Thereby, munging and churning out insights. So, this helps out with one of the most mind-numbing data activities.

Why a tool like this?

Given the proliferation of tools and AI/ML systems, why not build out your own systems to analyse these What’s the need to subscribe to a tool like this?

The future of business moat is moving away from pure operational/marketing or any other business function to the ability to build data as a moat for the business. Thus data and the ability to leverage it correctly is key!

  • The future belongs to fast-moving, data-driven organisations.
  • This requires teams to rely on superior tools in terms of consistent communication, rapid experimentation and accurate analysis.

Thus, there is a need for businesses to adopt modern tools and move away from just the basic BI in terms of dashboards and charts. A difficult to read data output is as good as not being generated.

Thus, modern age tools such as Decidable allow you to:

  • Automate Reports
  • No specialists needed
  • Quick to setup
  • Upcoming integrations with Shopify, Pinterest and other data sources.

What do you guys think, please reach out with your opinions and take on the new modern age readable BI tools?

What are the challenges faced by you guys for these tools?

Originally published at https://startupanalytics.in.

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