What if we have only very little and the most basic data?

Big data is really hot word. I know many people are talking about it and wondering how to deal with the overloaded information, and how to take full advantage of this digital age. However, what if you are only an owner of a micro business, a founder of a start-up organization with very limited budget, or you are a freelancer or independent content provider and you only want to do better management of your personal website or social media platform? And what if, without resource or willing to get access to big data, what you have got is only very little and the most basic data?

Of course, still you can do a lot.

Usually no matter which platform you use, you can get the following numbers from the background: the number of views/unique viewers, when the viewers come, the time they stay here, where they come from and what devices they are using.

With all these numbers, actually you can get a good understanding of the viewers. The simplest analysis is to look at the numbers one by one. Here you know when there are most viewers, which channel is the most important, and on which device the performance of your website or other platform should be cared about the most.

Now we combine them together.

You have already known at which time where they come from. For instance, if you observed that in the early morning, most of them are from some news websites and in the afternoon many of them from websites offering financial information, and this happens repeatedly. Then it’s likely that this is the media using habit of many of your viewers. You can also do some psychological analysis of the viewers, for example, they are hard-working business man or they are concerned with their financial situation. You can even do some content analysis of the resources from which your viewers come to further investigate the viewers. For example, what kinds of financial websites are they browsing? Based the answer to this question, you may get some rough ideas about whether they are experts in this field or the ones who are eager to increase their income looking for guidance, you can even estimate their level of income though the estimation will be very inaccurate.

And think further. What if you observe that most of them come from social media like Facebook all the time? What if they usually come from shopping websites? With the analysis, you can not only see which channel is most important to you, but also examine whether your target strategy is working well, and whether the people coming are those you really want to attract.

At the same time, is you take a further look at the staying time, you may see that people from one channel stays longer than those from another. In this way, you may conclude that those who are more interested in your content also like to view certain kinds of websites, supposing your promotion of your website on each channel are the same.

Besides, why devices is important? If you see that many of the viewers view your content on smartphones, and the time is often at night, with relatively longer staying time, this may implicate that they prefer to do some deep reading (if what you offer is some long articles or serious insights) at night in the most private time. If purchase behavior is included, then the data about devices is even more important, because the purchasing experience may have great influence on the conversion rate while it may have different performance on different devices. You may give priority to improving the purchase experience on the devices mostly used.

What I have talked about are only some simple instances, the most important thing is, not to complain about the limited resources, but try to creatively use them and optimize the understanding of the potential customers or viewers as much as possible.