Let’s say for a moment that you have a company website. You want to use that site to its best abilities. That way, you can get the most sales, sign people up for your mailing lists, get analytic data from site visitors, etc.
One of the optimal ways to do that in 2020 is to employ streaming data. You can make it part of your data ingestion architecture. Many site admins prefer that these days over a batch data ingestion model.
If this sounds confusing to you, then we’ll back things up for a second and talk about precisely what stream processing is, and why what you do with data matters. We’ll explain some of the fundamentals of streaming data. Then, we’ll give you some real-world examples of what your company might do with it.
What Exactly is Streaming Data?
Before you worry about integrating a streaming-first data architecture into your existing setup, let’s start by defining streaming data. Streaming data:
- Means data generated continuously by many sources
- Includes a wide data variety, such as in-player game activity, eCommerce preferences, or social network information
These data streams might also include connected device telemetry. They might consist of geospatial services. You might get data streams from people using your app in real-time.
Why Does Streaming Data Matter So Much?
If you stop to think about what streaming data is, then it doesn’t take long to figure out why it’s so valuable to companies. With streaming data, you can:
- Build detailed customer profiles
- Streamline your website buying process if you sell services or products
You can always ask your customers what they like, but when you’re accessing their streaming data, there’s no need to ask. You can see things like their buying preferences, how much time they spend playing video games, or what they like on social networks.
A company might start collecting data with the simplest applications. That might be rudimentary processing or system logs. They can then make these apps more complex.
You might use more sophisticated streaming data collection services as you move along. You’re trying to get more detailed insights into things like buying behavior. By doing so, you can easily predict what products will flop versus those that will succeed.
Streaming Data in Online Gambling
Several states have legalized online gambling, with more on the way. New York is supposedly going to allow legal sports betting through apps.
One example of how you might use streaming data is data collection of in-game gambling. In-game gambling allows an app user to place a wager on a game that’s already in progress.
If you’re an online gaming company, and you’re monitoring streaming data from those who downloaded your app, you can come up with an incentive structure that you know your customers will enjoy.
Music Sales
Say that you’re a company that sells music through a single mouse click, whether that’s an album or one song at a time. You can study what music different geographic regions most enjoy.
Then, you can formulate a marketing campaign with that data in mind. You can offer discounted rap music to one part of the country, for instance, and country to another. You can do some ultra-targeted advertising of flash sales to try and generate some quick revenue.
Real Estate Applications
The real estate industry always embraces technology, and there’s plenty it can do with streaming data. You can monitor data from those who downloaded your app. Then, you can see who is shopping for houses in what price range in particular geographic areas.
In later versions of your app, you can customize it based on where it’s being downloaded and used. You can prioritize the features that your customers liked, and you can phase out those that they didn’t seem to enjoy as much.
Transportation
You can also use streaming data if you’re running a service like Uber or Lyft. With ride-sharing, a person might be going to the hospital or a physical therapy facility if they can’t drive, and they don’t want to use public transportation.
You might then choose to run a promotion where you discount rides to medical buildings or similar destinations.
As you learn more about streaming data, you can see why you might use it for data collection over batch data ingestion. Streaming is much more precise than batch data collection modeling. More companies than ever are thinking about utilizing it as part of their business strategy.
