Guide

Introduction to Customer Insights

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Note that, at this point in time, Customer Insights isn't available in China.


According to Sir Francis Bacon, “Knowledge is power.”

OK, true: there’s no evidence that Francis Bacon ever said that knowledge is power. But that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the old adage is correct: the more information you have about the things the better off you’re going to be.

And remember that other old adage, the one about “What you don’t know can’t hurt you”? Well, that one is not correct, especially when it comes to managing your website. In that case, knowledge is everything; after all, you need to know the answers to questions like:

  • Are more people logging onto your web site than were logging on a year ago?

  • You just finished a marketing campaign to encourage people to register for the site. Did that marketing campaign do any good?

  • Someone told you that a surprisingly-large number of users in the under 40 age group have stopped logging onto your site. Is that true?

  • It’s been suggested that you localize some of your web content. Do you have enough users from outside the US to justify that effort?

  • It’s time for maintenance and updates, something that could take a full day. Which day of the week would cause the least disruption if the site was down for an extended period of time?

Those are important questions, but they’re also questions that can be difficult to answer with any certainty.

You know, unless you have Customer Insights:

Customer Insights is the ​Akamai​ Identity Cloud's premier reporting and data analytics tool. With Customer Insights you can use reports and dashboards (either those that ship with the product or those that you build yourself) to answer questions about such things as who is logging on to your site and where are they logging on from.

Best of all, this sophisticated data retrieval and analysis can be carried out by using a point and click interface that shields you from the complexity of database access and database queries. Need information about the web browsers people are using the access your site? If you wanted to, you could write a SQL query similar to this:

SELECT
user\_agent\_dim.browser  AS "user\_agent\_dim.browser",
COUNT(DISTINCT user\_agent\_dim.user\_agent\_id ) AS "user\_agent\_dim.count"
FROM janrain.event\_fact  AS event\_fact
LEFT JOIN janrain.app\_dim  AS app\_dim ON event\_fact.app\_id = app\_dim.app\_id
LEFT JOIN janrain.user\_agent\_dim  AS user\_agent\_dim ON event\_fact.user\_agent\_id = user\_agent\_dim.user\_agent\_id
WHERE ((CASE WHEN '' = 'y'
THEN bcrypt(app\_dim.capture\_app\_id)
ELSE
app\_dim.capture\_app\_id
END) LIKE '%')
GROUP BY 1
ORDER BY 2 DESC
LIMIT 500

Or, with just a couple clicks of the mouse, you could create a Customer Insights “Explore” that does all the work for you:

And yes, now that you mention it, you can display the returned data as a column chart rather than a table:

Unless you’d prefer a pie chart:

Or maybe -- well, you get the idea.

Updated almost 2 years ago