Summary

In this chapter, we delved into what we mean by marketing analytics. We broke down the types of analytics—from descriptive to prescriptive— discussed the value they add to businesses, and learned what questions each of them answers.

We investigated the fundamental questions you are trying to answer—what happened, when did it happen, how did it happen, what will happen in the future, and how can I make something happen. We also covered how they relate to each sub-domain of analytics, and we can now distinguish clearly between descriptive, predictive, diagnostic, and prescriptive analytics.

First, analytics is a complex field that can be summarized as the intersection between statistics, computer science, and analysis. You need to understand that marketing analytics distills those tools and techniques to the efforts of marketing to better optimize spending and obtain a return on investment.

Analytics can be split into question categories that map...