4 business analytics examples

Too many companies manage their data in silos. Marketing data stays with the marketing team, product data is confined to product teams, and leadership is focused on revenue and growth metrics. When this happens, no one gets the complete picture, and everyone misses out on valuable insights.

Business analytics are tools and processes that allow companies to track and measure events across product data, marketing data, and revenue data, pulling everything into a single place. With the right systems, everyone from the C-suite down can combine data from different sources and see how actions across teams impact each other. 

Modern companies need business analytics tools to find advantages and lean into efficiencies. Without them, they’re flying blind. 

The difference between business analytics and business reporting (or business intelligence)

Business analytics is wider than just product analytics because it uses more than just product data. 

But it’s also different from business reporting. Business reporting, often visualized in a dashboard in a business intelligence tool, is just a snapshot of how various metrics are performing across the company. It can show you if revenue went up or down, or how much your user base has increased. 

What it can’t show you is why those metrics are moving or how to improve them. To understand all of that, you need analysis, a process that looks like this: 

• Examine your metrics
• Dive deeper into the data behind them
• Devise hypotheses for what’s driving results
• Test those hypothesis with operational changes or improvements
• Rinse and repeat

To perform analysis like this, you need to use the right tools. 

When companies first try to unify their data, they often rely on analysts to pull that information from their data warehouse and make it available to different teams on an ad-hoc basis. This approach puts a strain on resources and often prevents analysts from focusing on more strategic tasks. 

Companies that truly want to make the most of their data need to make it accessible to all of their employees. That allows them to perform their own analysis, test their theories, and share what they learn with their teammates. 

Business analytics examples

Being able to perform analysis with data from across the business is the key to breaking down silos and making it easier for teams to work together towards the same goals.

Here are several examples of how companies have used Mixpanel to do just that.

Allocating resources

At Bolt, teams across the company rely on Mixpanel for insights, including engineering, marketing, operations, and senior management. This helps teams collaborate more closely and allows Bolt to use data to inform business decisions. 

When the company was looking at engineer allocation, they were able to use Mixpanel data to see how many riders were using the Android 4 app and the value of those rides. With that data, they were able to build a business case to stop supporting the older Android app, which freed up 15% of the Android engineering team’s resources.

Saving analysts time

In the middle of the Italian tax season, European mobile platform Taxfix was dealing with a lot of data requests from different teams, with very little time for analysts to complete them. They used Warehouse Connectors to send data from Snowflake into Mixpanel, allowing different teams to gain insights without querying. 

This was especially helpful for the marketing team, who no longer needed to sift through spreadsheets to answer their questions. Now, the marketing team uses Mixpanel to query data and decide which channels to prioritize, and analysts spend significantly less time writing ad hoc SQL queries for other teams.

With Mixpanel’s Warehouse Connectors, you can easily send data from Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift to Mixpanel to track, monitor, and analyze all business data in a single place. 

Supporting CSMs with business data

Fitness startup Sport Heroes needed a fast and convenient way to provide analytics insights to their customer success team so that they could spend more time on revenue-generating activities and less time digging through data. 

With Mixpanel, the customer success teams—and the clients they support—can easily track business data and see the metrics they need to make informed decisions. This shift helped Sport Heroes increase active monthly users by 20%.

Using business analytics to fundraise 

Fundraising is vital for any startup, and competition for resources is fierce. VCs want to see data that shows growth and (hopefully) future financial success, and the best way to demonstrate that is with visible, easily accessible business metrics that gain investors’ trust. 

That’s exactly how parenting health-tech startup May approached investors. With Mixpanel, May had all of their data available at their fingertips during fundraising meetings so they could answer any queries at the drop of a hat. Having this much control made it easy to prove they knew their data inside and out and helped them approach VCs confidently.

As co-founder Antoine Creuze put it: “It’s so important that not only do you know the KPIs for your own knowledge, but it’s critical in a VC meeting to have that data available and at your fingertips. You need to demonstrate that you can provide those analytics very fast and that you know your business. If you don’t know the key figures, it’s very tough to negotiate.”

Using business analytics to build confidence

Business analytics are the key to collaboration, alignment, and data-informed decision-making. Tying events to outcomes allows companies to make granular optimizations and be more intentional about their processes. 

Most importantly, it helps employees feel more confident in their strategy—they can back their intuition with data and see the impact of their actions on the business as a whole.