Today, to make a difference as a company or organization, it is important to take an extremely personal approach to online consumers (Van Belleghem, 2016). The way to achieve this is through data science, i.e. the smart use of digital data (Osseyran, 2014). Through analysis of the digital traces a website visitor leaves behind, one can get to know the (potential) customer better and approach them personally. However, the small SME has not yet taken this step toward datasmart entrepreneurship (Bloovi&Teamleader, 2017). They often lack the time, budget, motivation or know-how.

This project is therefore fully committed to awareness and information of how data and data analysis can also become useful for small businesses. On the basis of worked out real practical cases, a datasmart pointer is being developed, which shows very concretely how you can deal with data and which marketing decisions you can link to it. For each practical case, a complete data mining cycle (Witten, 2011) is run through: i.e. finding out which data is relevant, capturing this data, processing it in a model, visualizing it and finally interpreting it.

It is certainly not intended to develop a new business intelligence or data tool. Rather, based on concrete examples, the guide is intended to reduce the threshold to data mart entrepreneurship. Consequently, the example cases must be sufficiently representative. We limit ourselves to examining visitor data from websites that sell a product or provide a service. The specific goal of the analysis is to increase the conversion rate of those sites.

The idea of this project arose on the one hand from the fact that the field is in need of new knowledge profiles such as data scientists and data-driven marketers. This project therefore creates new synergies within the ICT and marketing courses. On the other hand, this project is also a continuation of the PWO Social Success Meter (Verbeeck, 2015) in which data analysis is used to increase the conversion rate of social crowdfunding projects.

This project will work with different target groups. Initially, these are SMEs that are already active online themselves. Furthermore, there will also be cooperation with web and marketing companies and professional federations such as BDMA, feweb, VOKA, UNIZO and Safeshops. This both for mapping the current datasmart entrepreneurial landscape and disseminating the results and services afterwards. Appropriate awareness and information actions (lectures, workshops, etc.) will be developed for each target group.