According to Wikipedia,  analytics is the application of computer technology, operational research, and statistics to solve problems in business and industry.  Simply put, it helps businesses figure out what they could do to improve their business.

Right now, companies offering analytics are improving their services in order to help businesses in their efforts.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is offering a few new features in their analytics tools that will incorporate data from social networking sites.  What differentiates the new features from other social analytics products is that it will be more focused on counting mentions, retweets, analyzing sentiment, and so on.

“Those are important metrics for sure,” Group Product Manger Phil Mui stated. “But how do these metrics tie to the bottom line of a business? That’s what the CEOs most of the Fortune 500 folks that we talk with want to know.”

The new tools are designed to:

• Identify the value of traffic coming from social sites and measure how they lead to conversions or assist in future conversions.
• Understand social activities happening on and off of a website to help a business optimize user engagement and increase social key performance indicators.

Aside from the new social integration, Alight Analytics, a leading marketing analytics firm, recently announced that they entered a strategic partnership with Google to become a Google Analytics Certified Partner (GACP).

GACPs are carefully screened by Google and they need to meet rigorous qualification standards.  Businesses working with GACPs receive professional help with training, implementation, and consulting services to make their websites and ad campaigns more effective.

Adobe Discover

Adobe Systems Incorporated amped up their analytics offering by adding cross-visit analytics and other cutting-edge capabilities to Adobe Discover, an advanced analytics and segmentation solution within the Adobe® Digital Marketing Suite.

Cross-visit analytics enables digital marketers to see a visitor’s journey within the marketers’ Web properties beyond single online sessions, giving those marketers a more accurate view of the overall visitor experience.

“Consumers don’t interact with their favorite sites in discrete, unconnected visits,” said Matt Langie, director of product marketing, Digital Marketing Business, Adobe. “They do a search and hit your home page, read reviews, leave, get an email offer, price compare, come back and finally convert. The diversity and complexity of any one visitor’s experience over time yields very different insights than looking at each visit as a distinct, separate experience. Adobe Discover provides analytics that mirror the actual visitor experience.”

As big data becomes an influential trend in business analytics, we’ll see more companies incorporating cross data-sections into their metrics as well.  It’s particularly poignant when it comes to social media streams, which have an exhaustive data hose that’s ripe for analysis.  What we do with that data is still anyone’s game, but it’s a game industry leaders like Google aim to win.