What is data aggregation?
For business leaders, data is an essential tool. Data warehouses, which store vast quantities of data relating to business transactions, customers, staff, etc., can be analysed to inform business decisions going forward, from small to strategic.
Where does data come from?
The process of obtaining data from multiple sources and combining these into one complete, usable dataset is known as data aggregation. When data aggregation is done efficiently and promptly, it means that business leaders can analyse the data to see things like trends, patterns in spending, geographical data and much more, according to IT experts IBM.
Data aggregation saves untold amounts of work by gathering granular data and consolidating it into data which is far more usable and, importantly, can be manipulated and arranged by staff to answer different questions.
For example – imagine how time-consuming it would be to go through all of the month’s receipts to find out what customers had been buying and what time of day they were shopping. Data aggregation allows us to collect this data directly from a data warehouse – which may be on the premises or in the cloud – and analyse it efficiently so as to make sensible business decisions going forward.
Experts in data aggregation can be worth their weight in gold to your business. A data collection company such as Shepper can assist you in gathering, collating and analysing data, and presenting it in a visually accessible way so that your staff can see what is already working, and what might need to change.
What types of data can be acquired?
Data can be collected on just about any aspect of the business. Some of the most common data subsets to be collected relate to transactions – when, who and where – operational data or machine data – for example, app performance metrics.
Increasingly, data aggregation tools are being used to analyse social media interactions, such as how many likes and comments a certain post is getting, as well as the demographic that is interacting.
