What Is Descriptive Analytics? Types and Examples

Descriptive analytics is the cornerstone of data analysis, summarizing and interpreting historical data to uncover patterns, trends, and insights. It provides organizations with a clear understanding of past events, helping you make informed decisions based on factual, data-driven evidence.

By leveraging various statistical methods, businesses can identify key performance metrics, track progress over time, and uncover opportunities for improvement. In this blog, we’ll explore the key components of descriptive analytics, its process, benefits, and real-world applications across different industries.

Methods of descriptive analytics

Descriptive analytics involves summarizing and visualizing data through reports, dashboards, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to make information more accessible and actionable. Unlike predictive or prescriptive analytics, which focus on forecasting future outcomes or recommending actions, descriptive analytics answers the question, “What happened?”

By organizing and interpreting raw data, businesses can better understand customer behavior, operational efficiency, and overall performance.

Importance of descriptive analytics in business

For many companies, descriptive analytics is crucial in tracking user engagement, subscription trends, and revenue metrics. It helps businesses monitor customer churn, product adoption rates, and feature usage to identify areas for improvement.

Common techniques include data aggregation, data mining, and using visualization tools that present insights in an easy-to-digest format. While descriptive analytics does not provide future predictions, it lays the groundwork for more advanced analytics by highlighting key patterns that let you make strategic decisions and improve operations.

The difference between descriptive analytics and other kinds of data analytics

While there are many types of overlapping analytics methods, it’s helpful to recognize what makes each one unique. Here’s how descriptive analytics compares with major types of analytics techniques. Each type has its place, and when used together, they can give a holistic view of your data.

Descriptive vs. diagnostic analytics

Descriptive analytics helps you look back at past data to identify trends and patterns, giving you a clear picture of what’s happened. In contrast, diagnostic analytics goes a step further by examining the reasons behind those events. It digs deeper into the data to uncover the root causes of the trends you’ve identified through descriptive analytics.

Using techniques like drill-down analysis, data mining, and correlation analysis, diagnostic analytics helps organizations understand factors contributing to churn, performance issues, or revenue fluctuations. While descriptive analytics provides a snapshot of past performance, diagnostic analytics explains the underlying reasons behind those patterns.

Descriptive vs. predictive analytics

Predictive analytics takes historical data and statistical models uses them to help you anticipate future trends and behaviors. It employs machine learning algorithms, regression analysis, and time-series forecasting to make data-driven predictions.

This technique enables you to forecast customer churn, estimate future revenue, or predict which features will drive the most engagement. While descriptive analytics answers “What happened?”, predictive analytics focuses on “What is likely to happen next?”

Descriptive vs. prescriptive analytics

Prescriptive analytics takes predictive insights a step further by suggesting the best course of action to achieve desired outcomes. Using advanced algorithms, simulations, and optimization techniques, prescriptive analytics helps businesses make strategic decisions.

For example, with prescriptive analytics, you can determine the optimal pricing strategy to maximize revenue, identify the best engagement tactics to retain users, or automate personalized recommendations for customers. While descriptive analytics focuses on understanding the past, prescriptive analytics guides future actions by answering, “What should we do about it?”

Benefits of using descriptive analytics

Descriptive analytics provides organizations with valuable insights that help improve decision-making and operational efficiency. By analyzing historical data, companies can better understand trends and patterns, enabling you to make more informed business decisions. Some of the key benefits of descriptive analytics include:

• Improved decision-making: By analyzing past performance, businesses can make data-driven decisions that reduce uncertainty and improve strategic planning. Historical trends provide valuable context for setting goals and optimizing operations.
• Enhanced performance tracking: Organizations can monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) and assess whether you are meeting your objectives. This allows for continuous improvement by identifying areas that need attention.
• Better customer insights: Understanding customer behavior, preferences, and interactions helps businesses tailor their products and services to meet customer needs more effectively. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction and retention.
• Operational efficiency: Organizations can streamline operations and improve productivity by identifying inefficiencies and process bottlenecks. Data-driven insights help you optimize workflows and resource allocation.
• Foundation for advanced analytics: Descriptive analytics serves as the starting point for more advanced techniques such as predictive and prescriptive analytics. By first understanding past trends, organizations can build more accurate forecasting models and optimize decision-making processes.

By leveraging descriptive analytics, companies can gain a stronger understanding of their performance, identify areas for improvement, and lay the groundwork for future growth and innovation.

Descriptive analytics process

While the way descriptive analytics works may vary slightly from organization to organization, here are some of the basic steps of the process to help you get started:

1. Data gathering

The process begins by collecting data from various sources. This can include internal systems such as databases, CRM software, financial records, and external sources like social media platforms, market research reports, or industry publications.

The goal is to aggregate as much relevant data as possible to provide a comprehensive view of your organization’s past performance. Since the data may be unstructured or in different formats, it needs to be collected for further processing before analysis.

2. Data cleaning and preprocessing

Once the data is collected, it undergoes cleaning and preprocessing to ensure it is accurate and usable. This step involves removing duplicates, correcting errors, and filling in missing data where possible. Inaccurate or irrelevant data points are discarded, and the data is formatted consistently to ensure compatibility with analytical tools. This stage is crucial, as any data errors could distort insights later derived from analysis.

3. Data segmentation

With the data now clean and organized, it is segmented into meaningful categories. This can be based on various criteria, such as time (daily, monthly, quarterly), geography (region, country), or other relevant business factors (customer age group, product type).

Segmentation allows businesses to isolate patterns and trends within specific subsets of data. It also helps pinpoint key factors that may have influenced performance, such as a spike in sales in one region or a change in customer behavior over a specific time period.

4. Identifying historical trends

After segmenting the data, the next step is to analyze it and identify significant historical trends. This involves looking for patterns in the data over time, such as recurring seasonal changes in sales, long-term shifts in customer behavior, or growth trends in specific product lines.

By identifying these trends, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of how past events influenced their performance. Recognizing historical trends helps organizations prepare for future changes and refine their strategies.

5. Data visualization and reporting

Finally, the findings are visualized using charts, graphs, dashboards, and reports. These visualization tools transform complex data into easily understandable formats, allowing decision-makers to quickly and easily grasp essential information. These visual reports highlight key metrics and trends in a clear, digestible way, which aids in making informed business decisions based on historical insights.

Types of descriptive analytics

By employing different types of descriptive analytics, organizations can summarize and interpret large amounts of data, making it easier to make data-driven decisions. Here are some descriptive analytics methods that can provide unique insights into the structure and relationships within a data set, helping to create a clearer picture of historical performance.

1. Measures of central tendency

Measures of central tendency are used to locate the center or typical value of a data set. The three main measures are:

• Mean: The arithmetic average of all the values in a data set, calculated by adding the values then dividing by the number of values.
• Median: The middle value of a data set when the values are arranged in ascending or descending order. It’s especially useful when dealing with skewed distributions.
• Mode: The value that appears most frequently in a data set. If there are multiple values with the same highest frequency, the data set is considered multimodal.

These measures help summarize a large data set by identifying a central or typical value around which other values cluster.

2. Measures of dispersion

Measures of dispersion describe the spread or variability within a data set. They provide insights into how much the values deviate from the central value. Common measures of dispersion include:

• Range: The difference between the maximum and minimum values in a data set. It provides a simple measure of the spread but can be heavily influenced by outliers.
• Variance: The average of the squared differences from the mean. It gives a sense of how spread out the data is; however, because the units are squared, it is often considered less intuitive than other measures.
• Standard deviation: The square root of the variance, describing how spread out the data is relative to the mean, with the same units as the original data. A low standard deviation indicates data points are close to the mean, while a high standard deviation indicates greater variability.

3. Measures of frequency

Measures of frequency describe how often certain values or events occur in a data set. These are essential for understanding the data distribution across categories or ranges. Common measures include:

• Frequency distribution: A summary of how frequently different values or ranges appear in a data set. It can be represented as a table or a graph.
• Relative frequency: The proportion or percentage of observations that fall within a particular category or range. It helps to express frequency in relation to the total number of data points.
• Cumulative frequency: The sum of the frequencies of all values up to a certain point in the data set. It’s helpful in understanding the distribution and identifying the cumulative number of data points up to a certain value.

4. Frequency tables and cross-tabulation

Frequency tables and cross-tabulation are often used to organize data, particularly when dealing with categorical variables. These methods summarize data by counting the occurrence of categories and can be used to help explore relationships between two or more categorical variables. Cross-tabulation is especially good for showing how one variable interacts with another, presented in a clear matrix format.

Examples of descriptive analytics

What do descriptive analytics look like in the real world? Here are some examples of how organizations might use descriptive analytics to better understand their data.

1. Sales performance tracking

A retail company uses descriptive analytics to monitor sales performance over time. By analyzing historical sales data, the company can track key metrics like total sales, average order value, and sales by region. This allows the company to identify seasonal trends, such as peak sales periods during the holidays or specific product categories that perform better at certain times of the year. Descriptive analytics helps the business better manage their inventory and plan promotions more effectively.

2. Customer behavior analysis

An e-commerce platform applies descriptive analytics to understand customer behavior. The company gains valuable insights into customer preferences by analyzing user data—such as how often customers visit the site, which products they view most, and their purchase history. Descriptive analytics helps identify top-performing products and the most frequent customer segments, guiding marketing strategies and product development efforts.

3. Financial performance review

A financial institution uses descriptive analytics to evaluate its historical financial performance. By aggregating data on income, expenses, and revenue across different business units, the organization can determine its overall financial health. Descriptive statistics like average monthly revenue, variance in operating costs, and trends in profit margins help executives make informed decisions on budgeting and forecasting.

4. Website traffic analysis

A digital marketing team uses descriptive analytics to assess the performance of a company’s website. They analyze metrics such as page views, bounce rates, time spent on site, and conversion rates. By segmenting the data by source (e.g., organic search, social media, or paid ads), they can identify which channels drive the most traffic and how effectively the website converts visitors into customers. This insight helps refine marketing strategies and improve user experience.

5. Supply chain and logistics management

A logistics company uses descriptive analytics to track its supply chain operations. By analyzing data from past deliveries, shipping times, inventory levels, and transportation costs, the company can evaluate the efficiency of its supply chain. Descriptive analytics reveals trends like the most common delivery delays or costliest transportation routes, enabling the company to adjust operations, optimize routes, and reduce costs in future shipments.

Limitations of descriptive analytics

While descriptive analytics provides valuable insights into past performance, it has limitations. One key drawback is that it cannot predict future outcomes. Descriptive analytics relies solely on historical data, making it unsuitable for forecasting trends or anticipating changes in market conditions. Without looking ahead, businesses may miss opportunities to proactively address emerging issues or adapt to future shifts.

Descriptive analytics also may not uncover the root causes of observed trends. While it can highlight patterns and correlations, it doesn’t deeply understand why those trends exist or how different factors interact. For this reason, organizations may need to supplement descriptive analytics with diagnostic or predictive analytics to gain a more comprehensive understanding of their data and make more informed decisions.

Level up your descriptive analytics with Domo

Level up your descriptive analytics by using Domo’s platform. With Domo’s automated, real-time reports, you can share your analytics with various teams and empower the entire organization to make better decisions. You can analyze all your historical data, identify hidden trends, and tie descriptive analytics to your large BI goals.

To see what insights Domo can uncover in your descriptive data, watch a free demo today.