"If you were to capture every page a visitor clicks on, you'd get potentially billions of hits a day," says Agosta. "Certainly millions, if you're a moderately busy site."
Webhousing technology filters these enormous server logs into manageable — and meaningful — information. "You can't restitch that data; you have to reconstruct the visit," explains John Payne, solutions executive for IBM Corp.'s SurfAid Analytics, a Dallas-based outsourcing service. SurfAid reconstructs Web-site traffic with the help of proprietary software and IBM RISC 6000 computers, powerful multiprocessor machines that perform massive sorting routines on log data.
Some companies may decide to focus only on customers who can be identified, thus reducing the size of the filtering task. And they may simplify matters further by making a "judicious selection" of pages visited, says Agosta, such as product pages, customer registration pages, and FAQ pages. (Webhousing data can also come from cookies and registration forms.)
SurfAid sorts Web-site visitors by Internet protocol (IP) address, but it also offers technology to identify visitors if so desired. For set-up costs and a base monthly fee of $750, companies can transmit their daily Web server logs to Surf-Aid, which stores the reconstructed data. The service gives customers passwords to gain access to their data via SurfAid's extranet, and provides online data-mining tools for analysis.
Power of the Press
One SurfAid customer is the new media division of Detroit Newspapers, a joint operating agency for the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News. Each newspaper Web site generates between 7 million and 9 million page views per month. "What do we want to find out? What paths people are following through the sites," says Detroit Newspapers's Ratliff. "From that, it's often possible to draw some conclusions about what their interests are."
For instance, a large group of readers may go only to the Food section, bypassing the front page. "This suggests that this is a target audience that a Procter & Gamble or Kraft Foods might want to know about," says Ratliff.
Detroit Newspapers began working with Surf-Aid this past May. Previously, it had used an off-the-shelf product designed to analyze Web server logs, but Ratliff says the software "took a long time to crunch data, then only showed it to you in a single format. You had to recrunch the data to get other information. We were left in the dark." By contrast, SurfAid created layers of information, allowing users to move easily between different views and identify traffic patterns, including the 10 most common ones. "It was like a veil being lifted," says Ratliff.
During one week in October, visitors to the Detroit News Web site viewed 2.2 million pages, including 210,000 in the Features section and 743,000 in Sports; by contrast, the home page was viewed 264,000 times. Only 6 percent of all visitors looked at the Auto pages, but a subset of those visitors can be identified as car buffs, based on the relative amount of time they spent on those pages. "We can try to improve their [ad] click-through rate," says Ratliff. Their site paths can be isolated, and auto ads can be placed accordingly.
Examining Web traffic patterns by day, week, month, or overall, the two Detroit newspapers now have a tool for targeting ads, and for persuading advertisers to advertise. Their editors can get direct feedback on readers' preferences.
And then there's the kind of discovery that only second sight or business intelligence software makes possible. According to Ratliff, the parent company of one of the newspapers had assumed that a section of the Web site would be visited primarily by children, and therefore was a waste of time; few advertisers would want to spend much money on that demographic group. However, says Ratliff, "we discovered this section was getting more impressions than the Business section" — and most of the visitors were coming from corporate domains. The section received a last-minute reprieve, and the paper started to target ads for it.
One Billion Impressions
Detroit Newspapers uses Web-site analysis to help it sell online ad space. Autoweb.com, a leading consumer automotive Internet service based in Santa Clara, California, uses webhousing to help it do a better job of buying online advertising, as well as attracting ads and corporate sponsorships.
Autoweb.com makes money, if not yet profits, by "monetizing the visitor," says CFO Thomas Stone. ("We could be making money if we needed to," comments Stone. "But do you become profitable and lose out to your competition?") This means, principally, forwarding visitors' purchase requests to Autoweb.com's network of more than 5,000 dealers, for a dealer-paid referral fee. The dealers have signed agreements to treat these requests "in a certain way," says Stone. That means, basically, offering a fair price without hassling customers.
But not everyone comes to the site to buy a car. Many are seeking information on models and prices, which Autoweb.com provides. The company monetizes those visitors by offering their eyeballs to advertisers. Autoweb.com also teams with third parties to offer financing, insurance, and warranties. It even hosts auctions. "We have a very robust revenue model," says Stone.
Reader Comments» Post a comment