Book Image

Mastering Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy

By : Dmitry Anoshin, Himani Rana, Ning Ma, Neil Mehta
Book Image

Mastering Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy

By: Dmitry Anoshin, Himani Rana, Ning Ma, Neil Mehta

Overview of this book

Business intelligence is becoming more important by the day, with cloud offerings and mobile devices gaining wider acceptance and achieving better market penetration. MicroStrategy Reporting Suite is an absolute leader in the BI market and offers rich capabilities from basic data visualizations to predictive analytics. It lets you various delivery methods such as the Web, desktops, and mobiles. Using real-world BI scenarios, this book helps you to implement Business Analytics solutions in big e-commerce companies. It kicks off with MicroStrategy 10 features and then covers schema design models and techniques. Building upon your existing knowledge, the book will teach you advanced techniques for building documents and dashboards. It further teaches various graphical techniques for presenting data for analysis using maps, graphs, and advanced charts. Although MicroStrategy has rich functionality, the book will show how to customize it in order to meet your business requirements. You will also become familiar with the native analytical functions that will help you to maximize the impact of BI solutions with powerful predictive analytics. Furthermore, the book will focus on MicroStrategy Mobile Analytics along with data discovery and desktop capabilities such as connecting various data sources and building interactive dashboards. The book will also uncover best practices, troubleshooting techniques for MicroStrategy system administration, and also security and authentication techniques. Lastly, you will learn to use Hadoop for MicroStrategy reporting. By the end of the book, you will become proficient in evaluating any BI software in order to choose the best one that meets all business requirements.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mastering Business Intelligence with MicroStrategy
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Performing cohort analysis


Another very popular analysis is cohort analysis, which is used to research the behavior of a group of people over time. In MicroStrategy Desktop, we can perform cohort analysis in order to study different groupings to understand customers' behavior, cause and effect relationships, and so on. In business, cohort analysis is very popular for exploring customer retention over time. Usually, a cohort is defined by the date of first purchase or registration; sometimes we can use demographic attributes. Using cohort analysis we can simply track customer engagement.

Our dataset has the data for first purchases. We can build cohorts by grouping people by the year and month of their first purchase and then see how they perform.

Before we start we should build some derived elements in order to get the months between the first order and all other orders:

  1. The date of the first purchase has a string format. We should convert it to the data. Right-click on any attribute and choose...