Econsultancy’s Jeff Rajeck is publishing a series of articles focused marketing analytics. Previously he has posted about Descriptive Analytics and Diagnostic Analytics. He has published the third article on Predictive Analytics.

Rajeck says, “With descriptive and diagnostic analytics, we are able to describe data and offer explanations for why certain events happened. Notably, both techniques use data from things which happened in the past. The data itself, therefore, is never in question, even if the diagnoses are controversial.

With predictive analytics, we are still relying on data from past events, but instead of using the data to describe or explain the past, predictive analytics uses data to get more data. 

So why are we using existing data to get more data? Two reasons:

  1. The new data is either too difficult to get or not yet available.
  2. The new data will help us to make better decisions.

Note that, contrary to popular perception, the data we get from predictive analytics will not necessarily be used to predict the future. Instead, predictive analytics is mostly used to predict what a data point would be if we knew what it was“.

Analytics approaches every marketer should know #3: Predictive analytics

 

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