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Customer analytics is an activity within of e-commerce whereby customers' online shopping and internet search behavior is examined by software with the results used by teams of marketing professionals looking to increase revenues for online merchants.
Customer analytics uses data collection and subsequent software analysis to zero-in on customers' online order transactions for the purpose of sorting out specific customer demographics, shopping patterns, internet usage and applying predictive analyses to allow marketers to take measures to increase online business profit margins.
Other commonly used terms for customer analytics include Customer Relationship Management analytics, or CRM analytics.
Techopedia Explains Customer Analytics
The process of customer analytics examines and captures consumer behavioral data and guides segment markets. By doing so, this process can even suggest future product and service offerings to designated companies. Software tools provide the online capabilities to analyze specific data contained within databases. This element is known as online analytical processing and is vital to the customer analytics process. Data mining techniques are common within customer analytics.
A customer database can provide rich results for companies that want to find ways to increase their sales. But the rub here is that should customers discover that online marketers have shared or swapped their information with other marketers, customers might decide to halt their online purchases; especially if the online store they visited promised it would not share customers' personal information and shopping habits with other companies.
Online businesses usually publish a privacy policy on their website which states exactly what information gathered from their site visitors and customers might be used for. It is unusual for businesses to share this data anyway and illegal under the data protection acts of many countries to share personal information about anyone without their explicit consent.
Besides increasing profit margins, one of the primary advantages of customer analytics is that companies can capture accurate customer profiles without the costs related to direct customer contact.
