We reviewed the Blue Martini Software architecture, which provided us with powerful
capabilities to collect additional clickstream data not usually available in web logs, while
also obviating the need to solve problems usually bottlenecking analysis (and which are
much less accurate when done as an afterthought), such as sessionization and conflating data
from multiple sources. We believe that such architectures where clickstreams are logged by
the application server layer are significantly superior and have proven themselves with our
clients and at other sites like Amazon.com, which uses a proprietary application server.
Our focus on Business to Consumer (B2C) e-commerce for retailers allowed us to drill
deeper into business needs to develop the required expertise and design out-of-the-box
reports and analyses in this domain. Further, we believe that most lessons and challenges
will generalize to other domains outside of retail e-commerce.
We reviewed many lessons at differing levels of granularity. If we were to choose the top
three, they would be