Sales analysis helps companies determine the success of their sales forecast and predict future sales. Data mining and analytics groups aid in this process, with web and Google analytics being common types. Google Analytics tracks visitors through a tracking code and provides data on their source, helping marketers focus their efforts.
Sales analysis is the process of determining the success of a company’s sales forecast and how best to forecast future sales. Many companies now employ not only a sales and marketing group responsible for forecasting, but also an analytics group responsible for data mining and analysis. The data mining department looks for relationships and trends in the data, which helps sales and marketing to provide a more accurate prediction of what customers want.
Some companies, however, may outsource the data mining portion of the forecasting process and use the output or sales analysis to determine future planned sales. The most common types of sales analytics are web analytics and Google analytics. Web sales analysis is specific to Internet consumer activity. For web analytics, data is collected about a specific company’s website visitors through log file analysis or page tagging. The information is analyzed to determine how many visitors there were, the number of pages on the site they visited and whether a purchase was made.
Log file analysis includes number of pageviews and number of visits or sessions. Page tagging involves a counter that tracks the number of visitors to a specific webpage. Tracking takes place using a process known as cookie assignment, where each visitor is assigned a unique Internet protocol or IP-assigned tag or “cookie”. Sales analysis software consolidates the information collected so that forecasters can spot trends and better predict what might be purchased in the future.
Google Analytics is a type of web sales analytics operated by Google. Unlike many other sales analysis software, Google provides the statistics for free. In 2005, Google purchased Urchin Software Corporation, one of the largest sales analytics companies in the industry. Google modified the existing Urchin software to develop Google Analytics.
Google Analytics works by tracking visitors through the GATC (Google Analytic Tracking Code). Similar to a cookie, the GATC gathers information such as page views and number of visits, but is also able to differentiate between pay per click, referrals and search engine visitors. Knowing where the visitor came from provides marketers with powerful data that helps them better focus their advertising efforts and budget on profitable areas.
Pay-per-click visitors were advertisers on another website that the visitor clicked through to the website being tracked. Referrals mean that the visitor was aware of the site and intentionally typed it directly into their web browser to access the site. Search engine visitors arrived at the site by searching on sites like Google or Yahoo and clicking on the link.
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