business intelligence - Page 3

Analysing Crude vs Petrol prices

Crude price is at an all-time low. It has been falling since 2012 but the car owners perception is that petrol prices don’t always accompany this fall. For this analysis, I used crude and dollar CSV data sets you can find with a simple google search and my car’s consumption data set that I have used in other blog posts. By the way, you can learn how to use CSV files in this post. Let’s load the data in Viur and let’s see what we can do with it. The first thing that I want to see the Crude Price evolution. Impressive rise and fall! Now I’m going to check the price per liter to...

Connecting to a Heroku Postgres database

Heroku launched what they call the “SQL database service for developers”. It relieves the burden of database management by providing a set of features and tools that save a lot of time and effort. These Heroku Postgres databases can accept outside connections so you are able to connect them to the business intelligence tool of your choice. Let me show you how you can quickly connect a business intelligence tool to a Database. On your Heroku Dashboard choose “Databases” Then choose the Database you want. Click to get the connection details. Now, we have to configure this database in a business intelligence tool. I’ll show you how to do it in Viur. Go to the...

5 Essential Google Analytics Metrics

In this small article I’ll cover some metrics that can give additional insights on your marketing efforts and how do you get to them on Google Analytics. Plus some example charts I use in Viur for visualizing them. Traffic Sources Traffic sources are the channels that you have open to the web. You want to keep them effective and constantly bringing new people to your site. You should pay particular attention to the organic ones (all but the paid search) and keep them growing week after week. You can achieve this by creating new (quality!) content and distributing it in a blog post, newsletter, and social media. If people love your content they’ll share. also, if you are...

Key Performance Indicators

Anyone working on projects or an organization surely has heard of KPIs - Key Performance Indicators. Some even contribute to their calculation and are evaluated by it. What are Key Performance Indicators and why are they useful? KPI is simply the name given to a metric that is used to measure certain factors that are crucial to the success of an organization. Each KPI is usually associated with a goal or objective to be achieved. Regular determination of the value of KPI intends to measure the degree of progress towards objectives and their evolution over time: Are we moving in the right direction? Will we achieve the target if we continue? The KPIs can differ from organization to organization since...

Taking the most of databases without SQL

Small Data still has a major role in company's day-to-day activities and databases are still here to stay. Database engines are more powerful than ever and handle really well calculations, so why should we not take the most of what they have to offer? fig 1 - a database schema with its tables and columns Viur has a feature that lets you perform advanced calculations and/or apply functions over your data without having to know any SQL or scripting language. You can use your table columns to create new attributes that are called “Formulas”. When composing a new Formula you can use mathematical operators: +: Addition -: Subtraction * : Multiplication / : Division ^ : Power and functions: ABS: Absolute COUNT: Count COUNTD: Count Distinct...