Gaining Insights into Web Customers using Web Intelligence

The web is fast maturing into an important marketing medium that provides businesses with the ability to undertake oneto-one marketing and provide personalised services to their customers. Log files provide a rich source of information about customers that can be used to achieve these services. However, the knowledge required to undertake such activity is far removed from what is provided by the current breed of analysis tools for web log files. In this paper we describe an innovative Web Intelligence tool, Easyminer3, that provides marketers in e-commerce businesses with access to data mining technology that can sift through large amounts of data collected automatically on customer interaction with the businesses web site and bring to light useful marketing knowledge. 1 PROBLEM DESCRIPTION As web sites develop into a mature medium for customer interaction, organisations are realising the gap between the information they require to support electronic customer relationship management (eCRM) and the information provided by the current suite of software aimed at analysing web site traffic, called log analysis tools. While organisations want to know how to increase profit per checkout, increase retention of customers, increase browser to buyer conversion rates and reduce clicks-to-close rates, log analysis tools provide information such as frequency of page accesses to individual pages on the web site and counts of high level IP domains. Organisations have typically invested a lot of money into developing their web sites and web strategy. Now they are looking to assess the return they are receiving on their investment. Most sites use hits and page views as measure of success of the web site. According to a recent report by Forrester, however, using hits and page views as a measure of site success is like evaluating a musical performance by its volume [1]. So clearly the answer to this problem lies elsewhere. The technique used for measuring the success of a web site clearly depends on what the goal of setting up the web site is in the first place. A web site is commonly used for: • Selling products and services • Providing product/ company information • Providing customer support online to reduce customer service