Reporting is “the process of organizing data into informational summaries in order to monitor how different areas of a business are performing.”
Measuring core metrics and presenting them — whether in an email, a slidedeck, or online dashboard — falls under this category.
Analytics is “the process of exploring data and reports in order to extract meaningful insights, which can be used to better understand and improve business performance.”
Reporting provides you with information, analytics give you insights. Reporting raises questions, analytics attempts to answer them.
Analytics explains the “why?” and the “so what?”
How? Because it’s dynamic — on more than just a scale of time or interval. You should be able to contort the data to whatever you need. If what you see is a set of standard metrics, then it isn’t truly an analytic assessment (or an analytics product).
From this dynamic investigation into the data, you can derive real-life recommendations about your business. What should you change about your practices to improve your core metrics?
In this way, analytics is also special because it’s extremely actionable. In fact, it must be acted upon. The value of analytics is only truly delivered upon your own follow up, only if you come up with those recommended next steps and execute them.