What is a data point?
A data point is just a value, a singular form of data. It could be a number, a word, or an object. You collected data points as a part of a specific goal, research, or project. You can use a data point to spot trends or patterns, support a hypothesis, etc.
From the business stand of view, a data point can be used to track a marketing campaign, customer behavior, and which products are selling or not selling well.
From the scientific perspective, a data point can be used to track the progress of an experiment, the spread of a disease, the behavior of a molecule, clinical trials, etc.
Data points should be accurate, representative, free from bias, timely, easy to understand, and have some usability.
Examples of data points
- Number of persons who make a phone call to ask for a product or customer service
- Number of sessions or pageview on a website
- Number of daily likes on a social media post
- Amount of money spent on office supplies in a day
Data points are just a collection of facts you can use to analyze and make decisions.
What is data insight?
Data insight is a deep analysis of data points that can help you understand a situation and help organizations make decisions based on facts and not on suppositions or empirical or not scientific answers. With data insight, you can discover patterns in data. For example, after conducting a consumer satisfaction survey, you can determine that 80% of the people are not satisfied with the hours or operation of your business.
A simple data point collected, then analyzed can give you an insight into a situation that needs to be improved, in this case, the hours of operations.
Data insights can help optimize ad campaigns, industrial processes, medicines, etc. Also, can help to uncover new markets, products or services, etc.
How to obtain data insights
First, you need to define your objectives; what do you want to accomplish? improve the production process, determine ad campaign a performed better than b. Then you need to figure out how you will collect the data; you need a systematic process to gather the data, store the data and then clean the data and integrate it with your systems, so you can transform, standardize and use the different data points to start your analysis and get the data insights that will help you to take decisions.
Data Visualization
How you present your data insights can make a huge difference in the results you or your organization wants to achieve. It’s important to tell the story in a way that reflects your objectives in a simple but effective way so that your stakeholders can understand what is happening and what these insights are telling them so that they can make the proper decisions. To accomplish this, you need to understand the different types of data visualization.
As you can see, the data collected create data points that, once you analyze, can give you patterns or insights that can help organizations make good decisions.
