What is bigger – Digital Data or Big Data?

Have you ever wondered which data, Digital or Big data is bigger? You might have guessed it right! As the name suggests, Big data is bigger than Digital data. Let us see how?

What are some of Big Data Types?

Big data includes structured, semi-structured, unstructured and multi structured data from various sources/channels. Structured data follows a predefined data model or a data format. Unstructured data is text heavy and has no format. Semi-structured data is a combination of structured and unstructured data. Multi-structured data includes a variety of data formats and types. Some of big data types are as follows with some examples for each type of big data.

1. Digital Data (See below)
2. Machine to Machine (M2M): RFID Tags (Radio frequency identification technologies, track movement of material across supply chain), Vehicle Telematics, Smart Meters, GPS
3. Big transaction data: Health care claims, Utility Billing Records, Point of Sales Records
4. Biometrics: Facial/body part recognition (Finger Printing, Voice Pattern, Handwriting)
5. Human Generated: Call Centre agent notes, email, electronic medical records, paper documents

What are some of Digital Data Types?

Digital data includes data collected mainly through internet services.

1. Display/Banner Ads data: This includes clickstream data and online advertising data.
2. Website Data: This comprises of visitor profile data, weblogs and so on.
3. Search Data: Search engines generate a lot of data from search advertising. This includes data from both SEO and SEM marketing campaigns.
4. Social Media data is data collected using various social media sources such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, P Interest, Social Communities etc.
5. Mobile data: Data generated through mobile phones/tablets etc.

Conclusion

Big data includes all online (digital data) marketing data, offline(traditional data) marketing data and several other data sets not occasionally used for marketing analytics. For example: Biometrics is not considered part of digital but it is one of big data types. Some companies are exploring to use biometrics data to integrate online and offline data sources. This integration does involve data governance privacy issues. We can give great actionable insights by integrating biometrics data with online data sources but we need to make sure we address data privacy issues.

Digital data is all subset of Big data. In other words, Big data types contains within them several Digital data types. Digital data is big part of Big data. Analyzing and measuring right big data for accurate business objectives is tremendously powerful and results in great ROI for various businesses around the world.

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