For a long time, only large, well-funded businesses made data analytics the centerpiece of their operations. That's because standing up an analytics department was costly, and positive results were far from guaranteed. In fact, some estimates indicate that only a paltry 20% of analytics-driven insights yielded meaningful business outcomes as of 2022. At scale, though, that's not a major problem. After all, a single well-placed insight within that 20% could mean that a big analytics program had paid for itself.
However, for a small business, those odds don't always justify spending scarce resources on an analytics program. That was, of course, until a panoply of plug-and-play SaaS analytics solutions appeared that took much of the heavy lifting out of mining business data for insights. As a result, some 67% of small businesses now spend at least $10,000 per year on analytics operations.