We’ve all been surprised when, we’re browsing a website and an advertisement for something that we’ve been thinking about buying pops up. How does the computer know that we’ve been thinking about buying something, and how does it know how to populate the ad in order to lure us into buying it?
Well, that’s an example of a business using data mining in order to make inroads with you. It’s the same reason that movie watching services suggest certain titles to you after you’ve watched something else. There are qualities those two share that may make them more attractive to you. That’s data mining—grabbing pieces of information about you and helping to translate them into potential actions that are helpful to you and ultimately beneficial to the business. And although it sounds difficult to understand, data mining is actually fairly simple to explain. Once you understand it, you can follow best practices about it, too—and this graphic helps explain it.
