When to use SQL for data monetization

You can get most of the job done without of the box tools

You should have access to or own your customer’s raw data whether you’re ready to directly query it or not. As a young business or new product, its best to not query it yet and get your answers from reporting tools as this lets the tools handle all the work involved in the process.  These simple tools can help you understand usage patterns, trends, cohorts, funnels and so on.  They answer questions like identifying which sites you get the most traffic from or which features your customers are using and which ones they are not. Using SQL to answer these questions isn’t easy but using some out of the box tools can give you answers in a few simple clicks.

So, when should you use SQL? We’ll give you a few reasons people leave hosted tools and move to SQL databases and BI tools like periscope. Learning SQL may be tedious so you can use BI tools like chariot. They focus on delivering drag and drop reporting using SQL databases.

Specific questions about your business

At a point, understanding funnels, trends and cohort reports isn’t enough to answer your specific questions anymore.

Customized sessions and understanding behavioural cohorts

If say, you want to use a particular behaviour to understand cohorts like comparing users who take a particular action to those who don’t or whether or not there is a particular behaviour that increase activation and retention then you’d need SQL to get your answers. Often called finding your aha! Moment.

Another example is when a business has its own definition of what a user session is. Different businesses will have their own preferences for creating sessions. Using out of the box tools don’t give a lot of options for customizing your own sessions as they choose their own way to measure sessions however with SQL. Sessions can be defined in a way that makes more sense for your business.

Drilling down into customer behaviour

You can get as granular as possible using SQL. Here are a few questions that may be challenging for out of the box tools but would be easy for SQL

• How many users got a push notification to complete their order?
• How many users visited my website, made an account, put a product in their cart and completed their order on their phone.

Joining your customer data with other data sources

Joining customer data with other business data like operational data makes it more valuable for data monetization and SQL allows you measure product purchases or channel effectiveness when you connect marketing channel information and CRM closed deals as a way of helping retail logistics management.

Building custom dashboards

SQL can also be used for powering real time dashboards with metrics that are customizable so they are more meaningful than the usual standard metrics. Hosted tools can be helpful but not every company has the same way of measuring its successes using metrics. Examples of metrics that can be powered using SQL include

• The number of qualified opportunities per channel. We can identify the campaigns and channels that generated the most leads.
• The number of your integration health score which enables you place a priority on integration updates.

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You can manipulate data and tables easily using SQL and use them to answer whatever questions you have about your business or customers.

Using easy out of the box tolls can help you get a lot of your Data monetization work done, however they usually don’t give you the granularity to effectively understand your business. Using SQL ensures that as you can test whatever aspect of your customers or business you’d like to question.