Week 3

Web Analytics and

Business Models

Metrics Learning objectives:

* Identify common web metrics and how they are used;

* Examine server log data and understand what the data represent;

* Become familiar with tools for measuring web activity;

* Understand the limitations of commonly used measures;

* Examine the characteristics of a range of measurement techniques, from passive to cookies;

* Learn about trends in web metrics.

Everything that occurs in a digital transaction can be recorded in server logs and databases.

when you think about web sites, for example, like Amazon, and the large number of people who use those sites each day, each click of that mouse is creating a data stream.

Metrics and Business

Metrics are an integral part of all businesses and it can be a major $ expense both directly and indirectly.

Business Intelligence Tools (Mid-$range)

COMMERCIAL TOOLS FOR WEB ANALYTICS

Santos can't shake Oracle licensing costs - locked in to metrics

How reliable?

Any data analysis is open to interpretation and sampling methods may also effect results. Who is right in the following article?

Is Firefox still gaining on IE?

Eight strategies for delivering business intelligence on the Web

What is needed?

• Keep in mind that information is only useful if it pertains to decisions that need to be made. Therefore, firms should be judicious about what their information requirements truly are and plan accordingly.

Tracking your Visitors

• Don’t forget about tracking(What you can track)

• Long Distance Data Tracking (What you can track over time)

• Troubles with Tracking (What you can’t track)

Google Example

• Google analytics - How do visitors find, navigate & convert on your site?

Google Video

Example: insert immediately before body </body> tag of each page eg: OZRURAL

• <script src=" http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">

• </script>• <script type="text/javascript">• _uacct = "UA-1501856-1";• urchinTracker();• </script>

Good Use of Metrics

• FT.com Case study

• New Age metrics: Eye tracker

To the extent that you’re not using the kinds of sophisticated tools that help us segment out actual individual users, one can draw some misleading conclusions from server logs.

Summary

• Obviously, there’s a great wealth of information and data about customers and users that can be collected as people interact with you in the digital world. There are commercial and non-commercial tools out there that help you analyze this data, as well as for very large enterprises, home-grown tools which enable you to understand what it is that your customers are looking for, how they interact with you, and how you might be able to optimize that interaction.

• Clearly the most sophisticated digital enterprises are moving along quite quickly to do just precisely that. And so the Amazons, and Ebays, and Googles of the world are doing everything they can to understand and draw meaning from this data.

• In the future, the challenge will be – too much data, too much information, a fairly high noise to signal ratio. And so the kinds of things that we can do to build analytics that help us really understand the nature of our customers, and how to server them better is still going to be a major issue as we move forward.

Additional Resource

• Digital Enterprise

• Compucall Seminars (Web Analytics Lectures)

• Web Analytics Blog

Business Models

• What is a business model?

• Nine main web business models

1 brokerage,

2 advertising

3 infomediary,

4 merchant

5 manufacturer

6 affiliate

7 community

8 subscription, and

9 utility models.