https://rakam.io/blog/ Recent content on Hugo -- gohugo.io en-US Mon, 13 Dec 2021 14:27:35 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/we-are-excited-to-announce-rakam-is-joining-liveramp/ Mon, 13 Dec 2021 14:27:35 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/we-are-excited-to-announce-rakam-is-joining-liveramp/ Dear Rakam customers, In 2016, we started Rakam with a mission to enable companies to analyze customer data with low code. On this mission, we built an open-source data ingestion tool (Rakam API) that lets companies collect their company data from different sources into their cloud databases and a cloud-agnostic customer analytics and segmentation platform (Rakam BI) that enables companies to draw real-time insights from their data warehouses and create custom audiences. https://rakam.io/blog/introducing-metriql-open-source-metrics-store/ Fri, 27 Aug 2021 09:29:14 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/introducing-metriql-open-source-metrics-store/ Meet rakam’s newest product, metriql: The first open-source metrics store where companies can define their metrics centrally as code on top of their dbt projects and then sync their data models to multiple BI or data tools at once. metriql was born as a spin-off project from rakam as we decided to open-source rakam’s modeling layer and integrate it with other BI and data tools so companies using rakam for product analytics can also make use of their data models inside other BI and data tools for further analysis. https://rakam.io/blog/rappi-case-study-real-time-customer-analytics-on-snowflake/ Fri, 02 Jul 2021 16:16:40 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/rappi-case-study-real-time-customer-analytics-on-snowflake/ HOW LATAM’S BIGGEST SUPER APP USING RAKAM API AND BI TO COLLECT, ANALYZE AND DEMOCRATIZE DATA. Executive Summary Latin America’s first and biggest Super App, Rappi relies on product analytics insights to understand what features and products their customers actually want from them. As their company grew, the third-party analytics tool they were using failed to meet their teams’ needs such as querying the data via SQL or combining the product data with other company data like marketing, business, finance, etc. https://rakam.io/blog/aptoide-case-study-product-analytics-on-snowflake-data-warehouse/ Thu, 01 Jul 2021 21:03:07 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/aptoide-case-study-product-analytics-on-snowflake-data-warehouse/ HOW AN INDEPENDENT APP STORE USING RAKAM TO MAKE DATA-DRIVEN DECISION Executive Summary “The game-changing alternative Android app store” Aptoide is a driven independent App store and their claim is built on years of excellent services and intricate data driven-decisions. To retain their spot as an industry leader, they needed a much more customizable UI than what they had in Google analytics and Facebook analytics to enable them to draw powerful insights from user experience, and consequently improve their services. https://rakam.io/blog/jawabkom-case-study-how-to-use-rakam-to-analyze-firebase-data-better/ Wed, 30 Jun 2021 20:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/jawabkom-case-study-how-to-use-rakam-to-analyze-firebase-data-better/ HOW AN ONLINE CONSULTATION PLATFORM USING RAKAM TO ANALYZE FIREBASE DATA BETTER Executive Summary “Jawabkom – The first Arabic online platform that provides individual expert consultations” – Yahoo Jawabkom is an online consultation platform that relies heavily on product analytics to make correct data-driven decisions in their product development cycle. However, their previous way of getting these insights was slow and not scalable. They needed easy and modern ways to enable their teams to get real-time insights from their data warehouse, and that is when we came on board. https://rakam.io/blog/building-funnel-analysis-in-sql-vs.-match-recognize/ Tue, 22 Jun 2021 10:27:20 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/building-funnel-analysis-in-sql-vs.-match-recognize/ Fundamentally, aggregating event data to the user level enables us to look at how users progress through a particular website experience. As an example, we’ll demonstrate a typical e-commerce flow and what kind of insights we can gain. Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash The application funnel: a walk-through Consider the user experience at an online storefront like Amazon, Etsy, Target, etc. As a consumer, I would sign up, browse products, and proceed through to checkout. https://rakam.io/blog/product-analytics-why-its-important-and-not-suitable-for-todays-bi/ Thu, 13 May 2021 00:49:47 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/product-analytics-why-its-important-and-not-suitable-for-todays-bi/ We heard many times people asking the difference between BI and product analytics tools and whether they should use one another or both to answer the data-related questions within their company. We teamed up with Sarah Krasnik from dbt’s slack community here to talk about the major differences and why you might need both tools’ sets of features in your company. Imagine this: you launch a new product feature, so the natural next step is to understand how the feature is performing. https://rakam.io/blog/analyzing-public-bigquery-covid-19-data-with-dbt-and-rakam/ Tue, 11 May 2021 14:13:33 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/analyzing-public-bigquery-covid-19-data-with-dbt-and-rakam/ In an effort to help combat COVID-19, Google has created a COVID-19 public datasets program to make data more accessible to researchers, data scientists, and analysts. This data is available in the BigQuery platform and can be reached by using this link. For my analysis, I have chosen to work with the covid19_open_data dataset since it is very rich containing more than 500 columns of data. More specifically, this dataset apart from providing information regarding the daily COVID-19 trends (e. https://rakam.io/blog/analytics-solution-comparison-facebook-analytics-vs-google-analytics-4/ Thu, 15 Apr 2021 12:56:15 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/analytics-solution-comparison-facebook-analytics-vs-google-analytics-4/ Facebook Analytics was a free analytics solution to track and analyze Facebook business page data as well as mobile apps and website data. It was widely used by Facebook marketers to understand the user behavior across different devices and platforms so they could optimize their campaigns. It helped companies view the entire journey of a user from social media engagement (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, etc. ) to conversion on their website or application. https://rakam.io/blog/rakam-now-supports-dbt-core-as-data-modeling-layer/ Mon, 15 Mar 2021 10:11:04 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/rakam-now-supports-dbt-core-as-data-modeling-layer/ Most business intelligence products in the market usually come with an embedded transformation engine that lets you structure the data in a way that you want to analyze. Let me start with how it works and later I’ll tell you why it’s not best practice to structure your data in BI tools today and how our dbt Core integration might be the solution: Tableau has [Prep] and PowerBI has [Data Prep] as their transformation engine. https://rakam.io/blog/how-to-migrate-from-chartio-to-rakam/ Fri, 26 Feb 2021 17:39:41 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/how-to-migrate-from-chartio-to-rakam/ If you haven’t seen the announcement, Chartio is shutting down on March 1, 2022. It might be frustrating news for those who have been using Chartio for a long time as their BI or analytics solution. You might be wondering what you’ll do now. Don’t worry, we got you covered. Here we will tell you step by step how to migrate all your charts, reports, and datasets into Rakam and start using Rakam for free. https://rakam.io/blog/probabilistic-retention-cohort-sql-on-snowflake/ Sun, 23 Feb 2020 21:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/probabilistic-retention-cohort-sql-on-snowflake/ TL;DR: Retention cohorts are expensive to generate, especially if you’re working on a database lacking analytic functions. A deterministic approach is; joining ‘first action’ to ‘returning action’ steps and counting the distinct connectors (user or device identifiers). Joining huge amounts of data should be avoided when working on big data. A better solution is to estimate the intersection of steps using the HyperLogLog algorithm, lets practice this on Snowflake’s HLL functions. https://rakam.io/blog/firebase-retention-cohort-query-on-bigquery/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 08:35:53 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/firebase-retention-cohort-query-on-bigquery/ The cool features aside, Firebase is also a powerful analytics platform with built-in funnel and retention reports. You can filter your user segment on various dimensions such as platform, stream, demographics or custom user properties. Firebase can also attribute your installations marketing channels down to the ad-set and creatives. Although this power feature is free of charge there are some caveats such as Apple Search Ads and Facebook Ads that are not supported. https://rakam.io/blog/free-product-analytics-with-firebase---bigquery---rakam/ Tue, 04 Feb 2020 09:45:26 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/free-product-analytics-with-firebase---bigquery---rakam/ Many of us landed on Firebase due to it’s powerful and free services such as Crashlytics, Remove Config, Cloud Messaging, Analytics and many more. When it comes to understanding how your users behave, analytics plays a crucial role. Building a custom data pipeline may cost you in the early stages of your idea. So why not use Firebase Analytics? It is free and has bunch of built in reports and a dashboard showing the most critical metrics, like revenue, version adoption, active users and so on. https://rakam.io/blog/recipes-open-source-data-models-for-third-party-integrations/ Tue, 14 Jan 2020 14:20:36 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/recipes-open-source-data-models-for-third-party-integrations/ From a small startup to a big enterprise company, people care about your ideas only if you can back them with data. If you’re a marketing person who wants to create marketing campaign that requires you to have enough budget, you probably need to have a hypothesis backed by the data. If you’re a product person, you either ask your users or collect their data in order to be able to decide the features that your developer colleagues will be implementing. https://rakam.io/blog/analyzing-liquor-sales-iniowa/ Wed, 16 Oct 2019 12:55:54 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/analyzing-liquor-sales-iniowa/ Iowa State has created a data set for sales of all stores in any brand of liquor. The data set is reachable from here. The data set holds quite detailed information about each sale done in Iowa since January 1, 2012. We can use the set to examine Iowa’s drinking pattern in terms of popular liquors, popular stores and etc. In this post, I will show my work on the dataset, but the special part of this article is what I use to get and visualize the information more than what I do. https://rakam.io/blog/announcement-we-partnered-with-segment/ Mon, 08 Apr 2019 07:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/announcement-we-partnered-with-segment/ Rakam is a product analytics tool that allows you to analyze user behavior by using features such as funnel, segmentation, retention, and SQL. Many product managers struggle with generic business intelligence tools because of the technical knowledge required to use these tools efficiently. Non-technical people become dependent on the data team to create reports, and this is where we come in and offer non-technical background friendly UI to reduce the dependency of the product managers by allowing them to create reports with just a few clicks. https://rakam.io/blog/how-to-export-data-from-amplitude/ Mon, 08 Apr 2019 07:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/how-to-export-data-from-amplitude/ Amplitude is a wonderful tool for non-technical people to analyze the customer event data but as your team expands your needs also evolve so you might need SQL access to your customer event data for data analysts & scientists. Majority of the analytics services won’t support SQL and asks you to pay a hefty fee for external data integration. If you have a deep pocket, you can export the raw event data after you pay the fee. https://rakam.io/blog/what-do-product-managers-do/ Fri, 05 Apr 2019 07:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/what-do-product-managers-do/ “Product manager” isn’t is the dream job of every grad student these days? Even though its a dream job for every MBA student the product manager role is still not clear in peoples head. If you ask “ what does a product manager do?” The most precise answer you can get is that product managers are responsible for coming up with the idea of best products to ship and help their teams to create these products. https://rakam.io/blog/how-to-reducecustomer-acquisition-cost-cac/ Thu, 21 Mar 2019 21:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/how-to-reducecustomer-acquisition-cost-cac/ In my previous article, I talked about the importance of adding CAC metric to your marketing mix. In this article, I will share some tips to reduce your CAC to have more profitable customer acquisition channels. There are a few things you can do to lower your CAC, but here I will talk about the ones I find it most useful. Clearly Define Your Target Persona It’s essential to know whom you should target with your marketing activities. https://rakam.io/blog/what-is-customer-acquisition-cost-/ Mon, 18 Mar 2019 21:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/what-is-customer-acquisition-cost-/ The purpose of every marketer is to help their company to achieve growth. Best marketers don’t just focus on growth are they focus on sustainable growth in the long term. Most of the times marketing professionals forget about the long term part of the growth and just focus on making business decisions to acquire new customers without thinking about the costs. So how do we think about the long term part of the growth and whether our marketing strategies are efficient or not? https://rakam.io/blog/growth-hacking-strategy-to-get-awareness/ Mon, 11 Mar 2019 21:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/growth-hacking-strategy-to-get-awareness/ I love marketing on Linkedin, and recently I started use Dux-Soup to create awareness. Let me tell you about my little guerilla technique: I use Dux-Soup to visit the profiles of my target audience. I usually set my bot for 200 visits per day. The reason behind this is to create awareness. Think about it this way; when someone visits your profile you probably check their profile back to see who is this person and what is he doing? https://rakam.io/blog/top-5-strategies-for-growth/ Mon, 25 Feb 2019 21:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/top-5-strategies-for-growth/ First, it starts with an idea, and then you begin to work on it and see if it is possible to bring your idea to life. After you decide that a viable product or business can be created from your idea, you start to work hard to get there. You worked hard and launched your business, and you thought that this was the finish line because you finally launched your product. https://rakam.io/blog/we-now-support-segment/ Mon, 18 Feb 2019 21:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/we-now-support-segment/ We have been working hard to complete the Segment integration for our current and prospective customers, and now we are happy to announce that our integration with Segment is ready to rock n’ roll. Segment is a great tool that allows you to gather your all company data into your data warehouse. You can connect your Facebook and Google account, integrate their SDK into your product, enable the third-party tools that you use for different purposes such as CRM, Hiring, and Payment and let Segment collect all the data into your database. https://rakam.io/blog/how-to-reduce-the-load-on-datateam/ Sun, 17 Feb 2019 21:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/how-to-reduce-the-load-on-datateam/ As businesses become more data-driven the demand for the data teams has increased as well. Data-driven decision making means that business user will be interacting with the data teams more often due to the technical know-how required to use business intelligence or any other related tools. Traditional BI tools require its users to have a technical background to use it. This means more workload for the data teams because the non-technical people mostly use BI tools. https://rakam.io/blog/how-can-customer-event-data-can-help-you/ Wed, 06 Feb 2019 21:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/how-can-customer-event-data-can-help-you/ What Is Customer Event Data? When you have a mobile or web app, your users perform different actions when they visit your platform. For example, if you visit an e-commerce website, and you add an item to your basket. This action is considered an event data. The scope is not limited to the example given above. There are many different customer event types for various businesses. Businesses collect event data, to analyze it by using various platforms. https://rakam.io/blog/support-for-metrics-is-finally-available-/ Wed, 06 Feb 2019 21:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/support-for-metrics-is-finally-available-/ We have been working hard in order to make our user interface useful and simple. Even though we have taxonomy feature which allows you to add labels, categories and descriptions to your tables and views but for non-technical people, it’s still a bit blurry to analyze metrics such as revenue, unique users or sessions because every time they use our Segmentation feature, they need to define them again and again. https://rakam.io/blog/how-to-use-analytics-to-discover-the-right-audience/ Mon, 04 Feb 2019 21:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/how-to-use-analytics-to-discover-the-right-audience/ What is the most valuable resource in 2019? Is it gold, oil, copper? Well, the answer is none of them. The most valuable resource today is the data. If you used your vote on oil, you are wrong. Data is valuable because the things you can do with it is nearly unlimited. Today we want to give you a case study example on how you can decipher data to understand the patterns and discover new opportunities. https://rakam.io/blog/how-can-food-delivery-companies-use-product-analytics/ Wed, 30 Jan 2019 21:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/how-can-food-delivery-companies-use-product-analytics/ Food delivery is one of the most competitive industry to be in at the moment. As consumers become lazier to buy their own food from the stores delivery companies are becoming more and more popular, and therefore their numbers are booming as well. In this article, we will talk about how product analytics can help you to better serve to your customers. The examples given above are the use cases we have seen in some of our customers. https://rakam.io/blog/master-these-skills-to-a-become-better-productmanager/ Mon, 28 Jan 2019 21:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/master-these-skills-to-a-become-better-productmanager/ We did some research on what makes a good product manager and gathered some intel from the various sources such as books, articles, and interviews. We put together a list about the common traits of the best product managers but left out some of the typical things like “become a good person”, “work hard”, “be respectful” and so on. Before starting, we want to say that, you might not have all of the skills listed here and it’s normal, you can’t have everything, but you have to focus on the skills you have, focus on your strengths and become even better. https://rakam.io/blog/how-can-product-analytics-benefitbanks/ Wed, 23 Jan 2019 21:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/how-can-product-analytics-benefitbanks/ Having an understanding of user behavior is crucial for the banks to design better apps and products which would make users loyal to the brand. Many banks use Business Intelligence tools, but only the minority of the banks empowers their teams with the product analytics. In this article, we will talk about the various uses cases for the banks. Reduce churn rate and regain customers who churned Case: The bank wants to regain the users who churned previously by launching a campaign specifically for them. https://rakam.io/blog/benefit-of-product-analytics-for-e-commerce/ Mon, 21 Jan 2019 21:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/benefit-of-product-analytics-for-e-commerce/ As the race to acquire more market share intensifies e-commerce companies are doing everything they can to retain their current customers and gain new ones. This fierce competition led e-commerce companies to invest more into analytics platforms. E-commerce companies face several issues in acquiring and retaining new customers while not burning a hole in their pocket. Product managers are facing are with questions such as: What marketing channels are bringing the best results by delivering more customers? https://rakam.io/blog/why-product-managers-need-a-product-analytics-tool/ Wed, 16 Jan 2019 21:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/why-product-managers-need-a-product-analytics-tool/ Being data-driven is a must in today’s competitive business environment. As we transform from a manufacturing economy to a service economy data replaced the oil as the most valuable resource. With the rise of the data-driven companies, different types of analytics started to emerge as well. One of them is the Product Analytics. Consumer-driven economies require companies to have an understanding on their customers, and this is where product analytics comes in to help product managers to have an insight on their users’ behaviors to ship the right features for their products. https://rakam.io/blog/how-is-rakam-different-from-generic-bitools/ Tue, 15 Jan 2019 09:30:31 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/how-is-rakam-different-from-generic-bitools/ If you searched for Business Intelligence tools, you are probably familiar with big names such as Looker, Tableau, Periscope Data, Mode Analytics and so on. We call these tools generic business intelligence tools. This article will enlighten you on how we are different than the tools we mentioned above. Product Analytics We don’t call ourself business intelligence tool. Instead, we call ourself product analytics tool. We solely focus on product data and allow you to gather customer event data and visualize it to gain insight on your customers. https://rakam.io/blog/3-tips-to-reducechurn/ Sun, 06 Jan 2019 21:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/3-tips-to-reducechurn/ Churn rate is one of the most important metrics for a SaaS business. While negative churn rate is a dream of every SaaS business, high churn rate is the cause of death. Reducing the churn rate is a relief for the company as lower churn rate leads to higher revenue. In this article, we will share some of the tips we used to reduce our churn rate. No Self Cancellation Most of the SaaS businesses allow their users to cancel their subscriptions with just a few clicks. https://rakam.io/blog/top-5-saas-metrics-you-should-know-about/ Tue, 25 Dec 2018 15:00:06 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/top-5-saas-metrics-you-should-know-about/ If you have a Saas business or if you are planning to start one, there are several metrics you should really know about. If you look at the fastest growing Saas companies, you can see that they do know what metrics to track and improve. Here are the top 5 metrics you should know about. MRR MRR stands for monthly recurring revenue. Monthly Recurring Revenue is a fundamental metric for every SaaS business. https://rakam.io/blog/what-is-north-star-metric/ Fri, 21 Dec 2018 08:53:31 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/what-is-north-star-metric/ North Star Metric (NSM) is a newly emerged term in the tech world, originated from the Silicon Valley, and it helps teams to understand how they can have a sustainable customer growth in the long run. North star metric enables your team to understand the real core value you are delivering to your customers. Focusing your efforts to improve this metric is the best thing to grow your customer base. https://rakam.io/blog/how-to-make-your-engineers-more-product-oriented/ Tue, 18 Dec 2018 09:20:21 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/how-to-make-your-engineers-more-product-oriented/ Product-oriented engineers are sought after in every organisation. They are all around teams players, and they don’t just write codes. You can think about product oriented engineers as the owner of the product. They work on the back end, but they are also in the frontlines, communicating with the customers. Product-oriented engineers are like the chefs who cook the food in the kitchen but also serves it to customers as a waitress. https://rakam.io/blog/how-customer-event-data-can-help-your-business/ Thu, 13 Dec 2018 16:47:07 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/how-customer-event-data-can-help-your-business/ Customers are the backbones of your business. It’s important to know what kind of customer you have and how they behave in your web or mobile app. You need to gather and store customer event data to understand your customers better. What Is Customer Event Data? When you have a mobile or web app, your users perform different actions when they visit your platform. For example, if you visit an e-commerce website, and you add an item to your basket. https://rakam.io/blog/key-saas-metrics-you-should-know-about/ Tue, 11 Dec 2018 11:05:46 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/key-saas-metrics-you-should-know-about/ If you are interested in creating a SaaS business or if you already have a SaaS business, but you are considering to raise funds, then you came to the right place. Don’t get me wrong, I am not the person who is going to fund your business, but I am going to teach you about the key metrics you should know. LTV/CAC Ratio I am sure all of you heard about this commonly used metric. https://rakam.io/blog/what-skills-do-best-product-managers-have/ Fri, 30 Nov 2018 13:00:24 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/what-skills-do-best-product-managers-have/ When I was aspiring to be a good product manager, I did some research on what makes a good product manager or product people. I have gathered some intel from the various books and articles while I was interviewing some of the successful product managers I know. I put together a list about the common traits of the best product managers, but I left out some of the typical things like “become a good person”, “work hard”, “be respectful” and so on. https://rakam.io/blog/3-customer-engagement-strategies-every-pm-should-know/ Mon, 26 Nov 2018 11:22:41 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/3-customer-engagement-strategies-every-pm-should-know/ Every product has a customer engagement strategy and it is crucial to know about these strategies so you can understand what engagement strategy your product falls in. Having this information is going to help you to create a better growth framework for your product and you will be able to develop a precise strategy to hit your customers. There are 3 strategies, transaction, productivity and attention. You could say that your product has all of them, but it is really important to understand which one fits best. https://rakam.io/blog/you-are-calculating-mrr-wrong-way/ Sat, 17 Nov 2018 20:02:42 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/you-are-calculating-mrr-wrong-way/ From the conversations I had with the startups around me, I have realised that many of them do know about the important metrics such as LTV, CAC and MRR. But they are not interpreting these metrics correctly and this can lead to misleading information about your metrics. In this article, I will write about some of the mistakes I have seen when calculating MRR. I will write about other metrics in my following articles. https://rakam.io/blog/product-analytics-vs-marketing-analytics/ Sun, 11 Nov 2018 20:51:55 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/product-analytics-vs-marketing-analytics/ Product analytics is often confused with marketing analytics. Although the only common thing between those two, is that they both contain the word analytics. In this article, I will explain the differences between the two. Let’s start with a brief overview of two and then the comparisons. Product Analytics Product analytics helps you to understand your user behaviours and patterns with tools such as funnel, retention and segmentation. To get the best use of product analytics you need to have a mobile or web application. https://rakam.io/blog/what-is-product-analytics-and-why-do-you-need-it/ Sat, 10 Nov 2018 20:27:23 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/what-is-product-analytics-and-why-do-you-need-it/ Today the term of Product Analytics is not a well-known word in the industry. Let me enlighten you on this subject. Also, I will try to give you a better insight into how and when to use product analytics. Product Analytics In simple words, analytics that allows you to understand how your users behave while using your product is Product Analytics. This works best with digital products as it is easier to track and analyze customer event data with digital footprints. https://rakam.io/blog/how-to-make-best-use-of-product-analytics/ Sat, 03 Nov 2018 11:55:03 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/how-to-make-best-use-of-product-analytics/ Analytics play a big part in today’s successful businesses. We see that analytics is used in many aspects of the organizations. Today I will be explaining how analytics can help you to improve your bottom line by improving the efficiency in every aspect of your organization. Improve Service Level and Improve Efficiency Analytics help companies to understand if they can meet the customer demand without sacrificing from the quality and also in an efficient way. https://rakam.io/blog/untitled-2/ Sat, 03 Nov 2018 11:54:53 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/untitled-2/ Today many of the new emerging industries are already using and benefiting from implementing analytics in their organizations. Even the laggard companies we thought that would not change their structure have implemented analytics. In this article we will be going over the industries who benefits the most from using analytics to enhance their decision making process. In order to get the best use of analytics, you should have clear purpose and goal on the aspect that you want to improve. https://rakam.io/blog/how-to-create-data-lake/ Sun, 28 Oct 2018 19:14:01 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/how-to-create-data-lake/ What Do We Mean By Data Lake? In this article, I will be talking about a commonly used term data lake. So what do we mean by data lake? Obviously we are not talking about an actual lake here. I hope I can enlighten you guys about this topic. Data lake is a place where you can store both structured and unstructured data. You can store the data here in raw format without a need to structure it. https://rakam.io/blog/how-to-be-more-data-driven/ Wed, 24 Oct 2018 09:20:44 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/how-to-be-more-data-driven/ What is being data driven? We hear the term data driven all the time but what does it really mean? I will try to explain it simply. Data driven means that taking decisions based on on the empirical evidence rather than acting on gut instincts or speculation. Adopting to data driven decision making means all processes and decisions will be based on the data. Data driven vs Instincts based decision making Today many of the successful companies around the world, base their decision making on hard empirical evidence gathered by analysing the data. https://rakam.io/blog/how-to-do-retention-analysis-with-rakam/ Fri, 19 Oct 2018 19:58:18 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/how-to-do-retention-analysis-with-rakam/ What is Retention? Retention is a metric that, helps you to understand how often users return to your app/website after their first usage. The data is formed by the two events, which are First event and Returning event. Retention data can be charted daily, weekly or monthly. Why Retention Is Important? As explained above, retention analysis allows you to see how often your users come back to your app after their first usage. https://rakam.io/blog/how-rakam-is-different-from-tableau/ Wed, 10 Oct 2018 19:01:18 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/how-rakam-is-different-from-tableau/ How Rakam is different from Tableau? Today let’s talk about a few outstanding features of Rakam and how its different from Tableau. Tableau’s data virtualization is outstanding compared to so many other conventional tools available in the market currently. Tableau is one of the first companies in the world to give its users the provision to conduct complex data visualization in the most effective way possible — a simple yet intuitive drag and drop manner. https://rakam.io/blog/how-to-do-funnel-analysis-with-rakam-545a1c3c79f8/ Sun, 07 Oct 2018 17:40:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/how-to-do-funnel-analysis-with-rakam-545a1c3c79f8/ We have started to come across with quite a few people who are interested with Rakam and metrics we offer.But many among these are unaware of the features we offer, so in this post I will be talking about a very useful feature for analysing your users behaviour. Today I would like to introduce you to the term *Funnel Analysis.* What Is Funnel Analysis? Funnel is a well structured flow of actions on your website. https://rakam.io/blog/update-we-built-rakam-ui-from-scratch-and-made-it-even-better/ Tue, 18 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/update-we-built-rakam-ui-from-scratch-and-made-it-even-better/ We have been working hard for the last 6 months to build a great team and develop a newer and better version of our app. The first version served our purpose well for 1.5 years but we started to have difficulties adding new features, on-boarding new team members and adopting new user base because of the design. The first version of Rakam UI is developed with AngularJS and the UX was not optimized enough since we didn’t actually know our potential user base before developing the product. https://rakam.io/blog/what-are-the-tools-for-analyzing-your-event-data-2359c0085e33/ Sat, 01 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/what-are-the-tools-for-analyzing-your-event-data-2359c0085e33/ Event data analytics help a great deal in gaining potential insights regarding customers’ actions within your product. The data collected from users’ actions can help improve performance of an app or a website. As simple as it sounds, it’s quite tricky. One needs to have the right tools to analyze event data. These tools help track the behaviors and actions of customers within the products so that the researchers can monitor their activity, test new ideas, and gather excellent insights. https://rakam.io/blog/how-is-analytics-important-for-e-commerce-business-8d09486237a1/ Tue, 26 Jun 2018 09:30:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/how-is-analytics-important-for-e-commerce-business-8d09486237a1/ You can see customers come and go in a physical store and you know what they are looking for. You will be able to help them make the right choice face to face. This is the advantage of direct contact. The case is not the same with online stores. You might not even know if they visited your store. One way to get insights on your online store visitors is the implementation of Website Analytics. https://rakam.io/blog/what-is-marketing-analytics-a3523c48260a/ Tue, 12 Jun 2018 09:48:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/what-is-marketing-analytics-a3523c48260a/ What is Analytics? More important, what are Marketing Analytics? Analytics is the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. Especially valuable in areas rich with recorded information, analytics relies on the simultaneous application of statistics, computer programming and operations research to quantify performance. Marketing Analytics The practice of measuring, managing, and analyzing marketing performance to maximize its effectiveness and optimize return on investment (ROI). Understanding marketing analytics allows marketers and organisations to be more efficient in their programs and minimise wastage on web marketing dollars. https://rakam.io/blog/keep-calm-and-comply-with-gdpr-abc49bcf5c43/ Wed, 30 May 2018 09:52:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/keep-calm-and-comply-with-gdpr-abc49bcf5c43/ Every company in the European Union and around the globe has been preparing for the big day. Yes, GDPR! The General Data Protection Regulation has been in effect since 25 May 2018 and naturally, there are tons of questions in the air. What’s the fuss all about, you ask? How does it affect my business? How do I track my prospects / customers? How do I keep them engaged? How do I get consent to share data with a 3rd party service provider? https://rakam.io/blog/rakam-google-takeout-importer-analyze-your-google-search-and-location-history-data-ba45e4c66b1c/ Wed, 08 Nov 2017 11:22:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/rakam-google-takeout-importer-analyze-your-google-search-and-location-history-data-ba45e4c66b1c/ Google allows you to export all of the Google searches that you’ve done since you created your Google account. Despite this ability, to date there wasn’t a dashboard for analyzing this historical data. Because of this I figured it would be interesting if I could download my search history from Google and analyze the data and create a dashboard in Rakam.This February we published an article on analysing your Google search history. https://rakam.io/blog/data-lakes-a-sneak-peek-into-their-relevance-in-the-big-data-community-f3841e948dc1/ Mon, 16 Oct 2017 09:57:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/data-lakes-a-sneak-peek-into-their-relevance-in-the-big-data-community-f3841e948dc1/ With so much buzz around data lakes in the big data community these days, it’s time we looked more closely at what a data lake is and how it enriches the big data and analytics sphere.Let’s begin with the why. Why do you need a data lake? Why should you even care what it means or how it fits into the data analytics space? The Genesis of the need for data lakes The digital revolution brought about the reduction in size of computers from mainframe sizes into personal computers and as technology evolved, the computer further reduced in size into handheld devices like mobile phones, fitness trackers, smart watches and the list goes on. https://rakam.io/blog/6-sql-data-warehouse-solutions-for-big-data-analysts-with-their-pros-and-cons-18d34ca58fa6/ Thu, 12 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/6-sql-data-warehouse-solutions-for-big-data-analysts-with-their-pros-and-cons-18d34ca58fa6/ Are you confused about which SQL Query tool is best for your organization? In this technically dynamic world where data is king, many data analysts are faced with making the difficult choice of what querying engines to employ. Beyond that, they are tasked with sifting through the data storage systems these engines support, and weighing what they stand to gain (or lose as the case may be). How do data analysts cope? https://rakam.io/blog/data-security-how-safe-is-your-data-with-presto-7220989fa936/ Sun, 01 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/data-security-how-safe-is-your-data-with-presto-7220989fa936/ Imagine you resume work and realize that your data has just been compromised. Months and years of data all maliciously tampered with and there’s no idea where it all went wrong. Take John… John manages data at a company called ABC Technology. One morning, he’s asked to look for a better query engine that can manage the company’s gigabytes and petabytes of data. After hours and days of searching, he finally selects a solution, tries some data on it, and everything looks good — data well managed and all. https://rakam.io/blog/how-presto-brings-the-best-out-of-big-data-analysts-2eac50ef4f78/ Wed, 20 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/how-presto-brings-the-best-out-of-big-data-analysts-2eac50ef4f78/ If your job title resembles anything like Data Analyst, VP Analytics, Head of Analytics, etc, you know how critical your role is in the company. You resume work on a typical weekday and are already faced with countless reports to churn out. The Management meeting is breathing down your neck. A client whose data is managed by your organization has called in. They want an adoption report on their cloud-based music streaming app. https://rakam.io/blog/official-announcement-rakam-joined-500-startups-family-8fd18a0e1ff2/ Sat, 27 May 2017 10:23:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/official-announcement-rakam-joined-500-startups-family-8fd18a0e1ff2/ We are excited and happy to announce that rakam just joined #500Strong Family last week for their Batch 21 program in Mountain View. Joining 500 Startups will allow us to accelerate improvements of our service in ways we’ve always wanted. With 500 Startups expertise, infrastructure and network, hopefully we will be able to improve our product and make it more powerful for our customers! In the Batch21 forty-three percent of companies are international and representing 8 countries with founders from the UK, Argentina, Canada, Israel, Italy, Hong Kong, Portugal, Spain, Taiwan and Turkey. https://rakam.io/blog/in-5-min-combine-all-advertising-reports-7f8d8863dbc7/ Fri, 28 Apr 2017 10:27:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/in-5-min-combine-all-advertising-reports-7f8d8863dbc7/ We were aware the spend hours for a single acquisition or advertising report sort of a waste time, instead you might use that time for different purposes. That’s why now you can create any kind of advertising report based on your needs. Therefore you are able to create your own dashboards based on your KPI’s as well. Monitor performance of campaigns in a single dashboard, and any data can be layered with other sources like Stripe, Intercom and Google Analytics for a deeper understanding of campaign outcomes. https://rakam.io/blog/data-lake-problem-many-reports-many-sources-many-discussions-d7f1dd4bbf9d/ Thu, 30 Mar 2017 10:43:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/data-lake-problem-many-reports-many-sources-many-discussions-d7f1dd4bbf9d/ Let’s be aware what does “data lake” means before we start this article. A data lake is a method of storing data within a system or repository, in its natural format, that facilitates the collocation of data in various schemata and structural forms, usually object blobs or files. The idea of data lake is to have a single store of all data in the enterprise ranging from raw data (which implies exact copy of source system data) to transformed data which is used for various tasks including reporting, visualization, analytics and machine learning. https://rakam.io/blog/analyzing-your-google-search-history-with-rakam/ Tue, 21 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/analyzing-your-google-search-history-with-rakam/ Google allows you to export your Google searches that you did since you created your Google account but doesn’t have any dashboards for analyzing your historical data. I thought that it would be an interesting case if I could download my search history from Google and analyze the data and create a dashboard for my Google search history in Rakam. First of all, you will need to export the raw events from Google using the Takeout service. https://rakam.io/blog/whats-rakam-8492c38ee16/ Fri, 10 Feb 2017 10:45:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/whats-rakam-8492c38ee16/ Lately we’ve been struggling around some questions for Rakam. Mostly we’re getting questions like;What’s Rakam?Why we need to use itWhat’s your core product?First things first and we should admit Rakam Designed for companies that cares about Data Driven.With Rakam you can create your custom analytics services without development need. No coding required. Rakam helps people transform data into actionable insights. From early-stage startups and small businesses to global enterprises, people everywhere can use it to see and understand their data. https://rakam.io/blog/comparison-rakam-vs-snowplow-44949d48df97/ Mon, 06 Feb 2017 10:48:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/comparison-rakam-vs-snowplow-44949d48df97/ Snowplow is an open-source analytics platform that can be installed on AWS. They handle the event data pipeline, collect data from multiple sources, enrich & sanitize and send the events to your data-warehouse. We’ve learned a lot from Snowplow, as their workflow is quite nice and flexible. The main problem is it’s still not easy to setup. As with many AWS services they provide you the tools separately, and you’re required to learn their nomenclature and API calls to glue them together and build your own solution on top of Snowplow. https://rakam.io/blog/comparison-rakam-vs-keen-io-8d9faeb85b29/ Mon, 30 Jan 2017 10:59:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/comparison-rakam-vs-keen-io-8d9faeb85b29/ Keen is also a custom analytics product similar to Rakam but is a SaaS service unlike Rakam. You send data to Keen and it provides you an API for you to analyze your data. It has enrichment methods similar to Rakam but they’re pre-defined so you won’t be able to implement your custom enrichment methods. They store the data on their in-house data warehouse built with Storm and Cassandra and implemented their custom query language on top of it. https://rakam.io/blog/comparison-rakam-vs-google-analytics-540e4ee8dcfe/ Fri, 27 Jan 2017 11:02:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/comparison-rakam-vs-google-analytics-540e4ee8dcfe/ Google Analytics is the leading advanced analytics solution mainly for websites. It provides tons of features from behavioural analytics to real-time analytics and the analytics service providers learned too much from Google Analytics over the years, Google shares its analytics know-how with Google Analytics to outside world. However similar to other Google products, Google Analytics has its own world. You should learn how to use Google Analytics and probably get help from Google Analytics experts in order to be able to use it efficiently. https://rakam.io/blog/comparison-rakam-vs-tableau-and-bi-solutions-dcc25a6c85/ Thu, 26 Jan 2017 11:06:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/comparison-rakam-vs-tableau-and-bi-solutions-dcc25a6c85/ Occasionally we get questions about the similarity between Rakam and Tableau or other BI solutions, so I wanted to add a comparison page for BI solutions. To make it clear, Rakam is not a BI product, instead a full-stack analytics platform. There are two products under the Rakam platform: Rakam API and Rakam UI. Rakam API allows you to collect data from multiple sources, enrich your data and collect it in your data-warehouse. https://rakam.io/blog/comparison-rakam-vs-mixpanel-2c62475a9111/ Wed, 25 Jan 2017 11:12:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/comparison-rakam-vs-mixpanel-2c62475a9111/ Mixpanel is one of the first and probably the leading event analytics solution in the SaaS market. They collect data with their SDKs from your clients and allow you analyse your data with a simple user interface. We also have the similar flow for data ingestion, you can use our SDKs or API directly in order the send the event data and similar to Mixpanel, we provide segmentation (event explorer), funnel, retention, explore (user attribution) and insight (user drill down) features. https://rakam.io/blog/why-sql-superior-for-analytic-queries-comparison-with-mixpanels-jql-ec9935f292bd/ Wed, 07 Dec 2016 11:17:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/why-sql-superior-for-analytic-queries-comparison-with-mixpanels-jql-ec9935f292bd/ I wanted write about using only SQL for analytical queries (possibly for big-data) because when I talk about SQL, people usually tend to say that it’s not a good fit for analytics and they have to write complex code in Java or use a NO-SQL solution that has custom query language because in big-data world, all the paradigms should be changed and become complex. I actually like Mixpanel because of its simplicity but since they argue that SQL is so old and we need JS or JSON as query language, it will try to answer their arguments about SQL because when I look into their landing page, I have a lot to talk about. https://rakam.io/blog/hello-world/ Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://rakam.io/blog/hello-world/ The story begins…