Website Design from the Trenches
Abstract
This is the first of four chapters that deal with the analysis of data on the Internet and in an online environment. This chapter gives an introduction to website analysis and Internet search using two contrasting case studies: first, the chapter discusses how to analyze the transactional data from customer visits to a business’s website, and second, it explores how Internet search can be used as a market research tool. The examples serve to illustrate how the Internet can be used as a tool for individual marketing, mass marketing, and marketing sentiment surveys. The examples also illustrate the following two business objectives: (i) analyzing activity on a website to adapt the website’s commercial offering at both the general and individual levels, and (ii) gathering commercial information on the Internet from a diversity of sources in order to analyze and understand the marketplace. From a data mining perspective (and recalling the data sources in ), throughout this chapter the Internet could be considered as a meta data source born from a company's Internet presence. Following each case study, details are given of which technical techniques are relevant and which software applications could be used for the examples.