Web-analysis: stripping away the hype

Web sites provide a tremendous opportunity to learn more about the interests of customers, whether those customers are potential buyers visiting a commercial site, students browsing a university's Web page, or citizens logging onto a city's home page. In conjunction with cookie, registration, platform, and access information, we can learn a great deal about users by tracking their item-by-item click histories-or clickstreams. We can then use this information to customize sites dynamically and target ads for higher click-through rates. Maybe. Stripped of all the hype and the buzzwords, inferring the interests and preferences of site visitors is a market research problem. It is a market research problem with some very challenging data management and statistical analysis issues. And unless we address the basic tenets of market research-including the fundamentals of data analysis-site analysis can turn out to be a tremendous loss of time and money as well as a missed opportunity for using some valuable information.