Introducing Alteryx Auto Insights Common Causes
We are excited to announce the latest release of Alteryx Auto Insights. With this new release comes a groundbreaking new feature, Common Causes, which enables business users to perform more complex and challenging root cause analysis by thoroughly exploring the relationship between two key metrics. With Common Causes, users will now be able to apply the power of Auto Insights to a range of new use cases, resulting in a new tranche of value being delivered to our users.
The use cases for Common Causes are abundant, but here are a few that stand out:
Price Elasticity: Pricing and strategy teams can maximize revenue by understanding the impact of a price change or examining the relationship between changes in price and changes in demand for a product, good, or service.
Marketing Effectiveness: Marketers can optimize ROI by quickly understanding the impact of campaign expenditures, examining the relationship between campaign spend and leads generated.
Performance benchmarking: Finance teams can improve financial health by understanding how macroeconomic factors are impacting their business environment and comparing sales KPIs against market indicators such as inflation.
Root Cause Analysis is a core feature of Auto Insights, allowing users to rapidly uncover the trends in their results. Analysts and business users alike use Auto Insights to move beyond understanding “What Happened” and spend more time understanding “why” results have occurred. Auto Insights tells users what factors most likely impact results so that actions can be taken for optimal outcomes in the future.
Until now, Auto Insights has done this by examining the correlation between one key target metric (e.g., revenue) and any other columns in the dataset (e.g., region, product, sales rep, etc.). In addition to this, by applying machine learning methods, Auto Insights generates “Most Likely Causes” for changes in the one key target metric (e.g., revenue).
But what if we want to examine two key target metrics — for example, revenue AND quantity?
Now, with the release of Common Causes, Auto Insights will be able to apply this same framework to more complex use cases. With Common Causes, Auto Insights will be able to analyze two different metrics in your data and provide insights into the relationship between the two metrics. Users will quickly understand if two metrics move in the same direction and the strength of a correlation between them. This allows business users to gain an even deeper understanding of what factors are impacting their most critical KPIs by providing them with an explanation of how performance is connected across two metrics over time.
Think of Common Causes like a doctor's diagnosis. When trying to diagnose a fever, a doctor looks at several symptoms, such as temperature, cough, and overall health, to determine the root cause of the fever. In the same way, understanding the common causes for change across two metrics can give you a more comprehensive view and, ultimately, a more accurate diagnosis or solution. Common Causes provides insights into the relationship between the two metrics, such as:
The type of correlation between the two metrics (e.g., whether they move up or down together, lead-lag indicators, etc.)
The degree of correlation between the two metrics (e.g., if one increased, how much the other also increased)
The quantified business impact if the relationship between the two metrics changes (e.g., if profit experiences faster growth than revenue this month versus what we have seen in the past, we can see the delta between expected revenue and actual revenue)
Alteryx Auto Insights is an integral part of the Alteryx product portfolio. Our mission is to empower everyone to generate game-changing insights about their business, without relying on data experts or data science teams. As an analytics assistant, Auto Insights applies tried and true machine learning models to any dataset to extract key insights about results in just a few minutes. These insights are then displayed in easy-to-interpret visualizations and explained in simple and clear plain English. The combination of Auto Insights with the other products in the Alteryx portfolio enables anyone to make better decisions faster by easily gaining access to actionable information from their data warehouse or cloud platform.
Common Causes is the latest feature in the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform that end users and business stakeholders will operationalize and engage with to drive meaningful change in their business environments. Together with our other best-in-class products, the Alteryx Analytics Cloud democratizes analytics and enables all employees to make intelligent decisions.
The value of Common Causes grows exponentially when used as part of a unified, enterprise-grade solution that provides automated data preparation and analytics, approachable machine learning, and automated insights with data stories. We can’t wait to hear the insights, actions, and outcomes that Common Causes unlocks for each of our customers.
written by Alteryx
