What Is Descriptive Analytics? 5 Examples

Data analytics is a valuable tool for businesses aiming to increase revenue, improve products, and retain customers. According to research by global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, companies that use data analytics are 23 times more likely to outperform competitors in terms of new customer acquisition than non-data-driven companies. They were also nine times more likely to surpass them in measures of customer loyalty and 19 times more likely to achieve above-average profitability.

Data analytics can be broken into four key types:

• Descriptive, which answers the question, “What happened?”
• Diagnostic, which answers the question, “Why did this happen?”
• Predictive, which answers the question, “What might happen in the future?”
• Prescriptive, which answers the question, “What should we do next?”

Each type of data analysis can help you reach specific goals and be used in tandem to create a full picture of data that informs your organization’s strategy formulation and decision-making.

Descriptive analytics can be leveraged on its own or act as a foundation for the other three analytics types. If you’re new to the field of business analytics, descriptive analytics is an accessible and rewarding place to start.

What Is Descriptive Analytics?

Descriptive analytics is the process of using current and historical data to identify trends and relationships. It’s sometimes called the simplest form of data analysis because it describes trends and relationships but doesn’t dig deeper.

Descriptive analytics is relatively accessible and likely something your organization uses daily. Basic statistical software, such as Microsoft Excel or data visualization tools, such as Google Charts and Tableau, can help parse data, identify trends and relationships between variables, and visually display information.

Descriptive analytics is especially useful for communicating change over time and uses trends as a springboard for further analysis to drive decision-making.

Here are five examples of descriptive analytics in action to apply at your organization.

Related: 5 Business Analytics Skills for Professionals

5 Examples of Descriptive Analytics

1. Traffic and Engagement Reports

One example of descriptive analytics is reporting. If your organization tracks engagement in the form of social media analytics or web traffic, you’re already using descriptive analytics.

These reports are created by taking raw data—generated when users interact with your website, advertisements, or social media content—and using it to compare current metrics to historical metrics and visualize trends.

For example, you may be responsible for reporting on which media channels drive the most traffic to the product page of your company’s website. Using descriptive analytics, you can analyze the page’s traffic data to determine the number of users from each source. You may decide to take it one step further and compare traffic source data to historical data from the same sources. This can enable you to update your team on movement; for instance, highlighting that traffic from paid advertisements increased 20 percent year over year.

The three other analytics types can then be used to determine why traffic from each source increased or decreased over time, if trends are predicted to continue, and what your team’s best course of action is moving forward.

2. Financial Statement Analysis

Another example of descriptive analytics that may be familiar to you is financial statement analysis. Financial statements are periodic reports that detail financial information about a business and, together, give a holistic view of a company’s financial health.

There are several types of financial statements, including the balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement, and statement of shareholders’ equity. Each caters to a specific audience and conveys different information about a company’s finances.

Financial statement analysis can be done in three primary ways: vertical, horizontal, and ratio.

Vertical analysis involves reading a statement from top to bottom and comparing each item to those above and below it. This helps determine relationships between variables. For instance, if each line item is a percentage of the total, comparing them can provide insight into which are taking up larger and smaller percentages of the whole.

Horizontal analysis involves reading a statement from left to right and comparing each item to itself from a previous period. This type of analysis determines change over time.

Finally, ratio analysis involves comparing one section of a report to another based on their relationships to the whole. This directly compares items across periods, as well as your company’s ratios to the industry’s to gauge whether yours is over- or underperforming.

Each of these financial statement analysis methods are examples of descriptive analytics, as they provide information about trends and relationships between variables based on current and historical data.

3. Demand Trends

Descriptive analytics can also be used to identify trends in customer preference and behavior and make assumptions about the demand for specific products or services.

Streaming provider Netflix’s trend identification provides an excellent use case for descriptive analytics. Netflix’s team—which has a track record of being heavily data-driven—gathers data on users’ in-platform behavior. They analyze this data to determine which TV series and movies are trending at any given time and list trending titles in a section of the platform’s home screen.

Not only does this data allow Netflix users to see what’s popular—and thus, what they might enjoy watching—but it allows the Netflix team to know which types of media, themes, and actors are especially favored at a certain time. This can drive decision-making about future original content creation, contracts with existing production companies, marketing, and retargeting campaigns.

4. Aggregated Survey Results

Descriptive analytics is also useful in market research. When it comes time to glean insights from survey and focus group data, descriptive analytics can help identify relationships between variables and trends.

For instance, you may conduct a survey and identify that as respondents’ age increases, so does their likelihood to purchase your product. If you’ve conducted this survey multiple times over several years, descriptive analytics can tell you if this age-purchase correlation has always existed or if it was something that only occurred this year.

Insights like this can pave the way for diagnostic analytics to explain why certain factors are correlated. You can then leverage predictive and prescriptive analytics to plan future product improvements or marketing campaigns based on those trends.

Related: What Is Marketing Analytics?

5. Progress to Goals

Finally, descriptive analytics can be applied to track progress to goals. Reporting on progress toward key performance indicators (KPIs) can help your team understand if efforts are on track or if adjustments need to be made.

For example, if your organization aims to reach 500,000 monthly unique page views, you can use traffic data to communicate how you’re tracking toward it. Perhaps halfway through the month, you’re at 200,000 unique page views. This would be underperforming because you’d like to be halfway to your goal at that point—at 250,000 unique page views. This descriptive analysis of your team’s progress can allow further analysis to examine what can be done differently to improve traffic numbers and get back on track to hit your KPI.

Using Data to Identify Relationships and Trends

“Never before has so much data about so many different things been collected and stored every second of every day,” says Harvard Business School Professor Jan Hammond in the online course Business Analytics. “In this world of big data, data literacy—the ability to analyze, interpret, and even question data—is an increasingly valuable skill.”

Leveraging descriptive analytics to communicate change based on current and historical data and as a foundation for diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive analytics has the potential to take you and your organization far.

Do you want to become a data-driven professional? Explore our eight-week Business Analytics course and our three-course Credential of Readiness (CORe) program to deepen your analytical skills and apply them to real-world business problems.