Analytics

Specifically, business analytics, refers to (according to Wikipedia):

“The skills, technologies, applications and practices for continuous iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive business planning. Business analytics focuses on developing new insights and understanding of business performance based on data and statistical methods. In contrast, business intelligence traditionally focuses on using a consistent set of metrics to both measure past performance and guide business planning, which is also based on data and statistical methods.
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In other words, querying, reporting, OLAP, and alert tools can answer questions such as what happened, how many, how often, where the problem is, and what actions are needed. Business analytics can answer questions like why is this happening, what if these trends continue, what will happen next (that is, predict), what is the best that can happen (that is, optimize).”

Here’s the gist:
Analytics give you an idea of your customer’s habits; what they like to buy, when they buy it, how they buy, etc. You can use that information to make adjustments to your business plans. For example, if you wanted to know the best day to run a special on, say, banana cake, you could track the number of sales on a per day basis. Maybe people buy them in droves on Monday, but want nothing to do with them on Wednesday. Running a special on Wednesday could boost sales for that item… or you could sell carrot cake that day.