What is Magento Business Intelligence? Why do you Need it?

Magento Business Intelligence is Magento’s analytics platform.

Do you need it? In short – yes. If you have a Magento website you should absolutely be using Business Intelligence analytics.

If you have a Magento site you are probably operating an Ecommerce store, which means that you are here to make money. This is the base objective of every business, regardless of who you are.

Every good business person knows that the more you know about your business, the more likely you are to succeed. The same also applies to knowing your customers. If you know who they are and what they do and don’t like it makes it much easier to cater for them.

What Business Intelligence analytics does is give you the information you need to be able to make informed decisions about your company, your marketing efforts, your sales channels and your customer service.

Data about your business is about the most valuable asset you can ask for.

None of that data will help you at all, though, if you don’t know what you are looking at and why you are looking at it.

We are going to take a look at how Business Intelligence is different from other Analytics tools, how it works, what kind of data it has to offer you and, finally, how to use that data to make smarter choices.

Magento Business Intelligence – What’s in the bag?

Cloud Based Data

MBI (Magento Business Intelligence) is a cloud based platform. This means your data is stored in the cloud, and you can access it from any computer or device where you can log in into your account.

This is fairly standard issue for all analytics platforms these days.

Site Integration

The major differentiator between MBI and other analytics platforms, is the integration with your Ecommerce store. MBI integrates seamlessly with your store, pulling data directly from your recorded customer database.

This means it pulls information on each customer about their purchase history, wish lists, source of entry (how they got onto your site), shopping behaviour, and even demographics.

With this detailed customer information you can create cleverly segmented lists for targeted marketing.

Not only can you target the products you show each customer, but you can also find out what kind of promotional triggers have an impact with them. Is it a 2 for 3 special that they love or do they love getting a promotional gift? Or maybe just a straight up percentage discount for being a loyal customer.

All of this is possible because of the level of data you are extracting from the store. MBI can leverage data directly from your CRM database.

The Magento Business Intelligence Dashboard

The next notable feature of MBI is the dashboard you operate from.

The data is pulled from your store using the MBI data consolidation tools. It also makes use of connectors to third party platforms such as Facebook and AdWords to give you a comprehensive set of all your data.

All of this data is then available to you through your Dashboard, where you organise your information into your own customised reports, as you need them.

You can set up long standing reports or adjust them as you need to.

Your Dashboard is customisable. Depending on your preference, you can use an overall dashboard view, or you can select individual data sources to focus on.

You have the power to grant access and permissions to different dashboards, so that you can control which members of your team have access to which information.

You can also customize the frequency of your automated reports.

Magento Business Intelligence Reports

There is a lot of information available about your customers, their habits, your business, your products, your sales trends, and much more. Below is a list of some of the most popular reports MBI can help you with.

Purchase Date History

You can track customers purchase history by date to predict when you are most likely to make sale and therefore when to focus your marketing efforts and whom.

Customer Lifetime Value Prediction

Optimise your marketing budget by marketing to the right people. This tool allows you to predict how much each of your customers is likely to spend. You can use this information to target the right people in your focused advertising.

Data History Reports

There are multiple tools at your disposal for marketing your business. For every tool, there is also a set of data and the MBI reports help you to cross reference the information to help you get a clear picture of your history.

Measure your ROI (return on investment) for your marketing and advertising spend.

Track Orders and Inventory and optimise your merchandising solutions. It also allows you to see where your most valuable customers are coming from – allowing you to focus in these channels in future.

Customize your Success

The Thing about Magento that has always made it such a popular Ecommerce platform, is the fact that you can customize it just about any way you like. The same is true of Magento Business Intelligence. Whatever metrics you are looking for, whatever is relevant to your business model, you can customize your dashboards and reports to give you the exact information you’re looking for.

All you have to do is define the metrics you want and set up the frequency of the reports you want automated. You control who has access to the information and what they can do with it. And best of all, you can collect data from all over your business platforms in one place.

Then once you have all the data you want you can export your reports as CSV and Excel sheets.

You can then share this essential information with your stakeholders, your business analyst, your marketing team and anyone else who needs to have access to your records in order to make informed choices about your company.