Web Analytics

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This paper provides an overview of Web Analytics. It describes how Internet communications occur and how those communications are logged. It explains how data from a web server's log can be harvested to generate useful and actionable business intelligence, particularly when the data is combined with existing customer and sales data in a Data Warehouse.

focuses on the interactions of customers with a company's website. Web Analytics leverages data from web server logs and corporate databases to obtain business intelligence on existing and potential customers. Web Analytics is extremely powerful when data from web server logs is integrated with data from customer and sales databases in a Data Warehouse.

Web Analytics provides business intelligence used to: identify technical and navigation website issues, better understand the customer's unique needs, interests and patterns and identify improvements for website design. The business intelligence that is gained can be used to design customized web sessions for groups of users that are based on demographics common interests and similar behaviors. For example, a web session can be customized based on the gender, language or geographic location of the visitor. Customizations to sessions can entail presenting visitors with web content and advertising that is of direct relevance to them. By improving the user experience, businesses can increase sales and visitors can be motivated to return to the site.