Infobright Blog

Every business today depends on some kind of online presence, and an increasing number of businesses are entirely online. These businesses often generate large volumes of Web data whose analysis is crucial to the success and growth of the company.

For most online businesses, technology is a key part of the value they provide and of their differentiation from their competition. For them, using an off-the-shelf tool like Google Analytics falls far short of what they need. Let's examine why:

Google Analytics and similar tools provide aggregated reporting on what content is being viewed by how many visitors, time-based summaries and comparisons, how visitors are getting to your web site and where they go from there. Most also keep track of visitor actions, such as how many visitors clicked to download a white paper or responded to an ad.

Web analytics tools also look at everything from the point of view of the website, and specifically provide a "page-based" view of the data. This helps you understand things such as which pages are of most interest to the most people or overall traffic trends, but it doesn't give you a view from the visitor perspective. This means you can't answer questions about particular customers of a group of customers.

The other key point is that aggregated data provides limited information and therefore limited value in terms of understanding visitor behavior, in order to optimize your website or increase sales. Most organizations quickly get to the point where they realize that this limited aggregate reporting is insufficient to answer many important questions that impact the business – such as "what are the characteristics of my best customers, and do my best customers use my web site differently than other customers?" " Can I predict from what visitors do who is most likely to move from a lead to a customer?"

Without access to the detailed data, or the ability to do custom queries or analysis, you can't do the kind of ad-hoc analysis and iterative analysis that usually provides the real value and insight. (You can read the case study of a global retailer who is using Infobright specifically for sophisticated predictive analytics). In addition, you also have no ability to combine the Web data with other data you collect such as CRM data, sales data, customer information etc. that provides much more value than web data alone.

Online businesses therefore typically develop custom applications and data repositories using technology foundations such as analytic databases like Infobright, data integration tools, with a custom front-end application. or use a business intelligence software to create reports, dashboards and other user-facing front ends.

Infobright is particularly well suited for these online analytic use cases, demonstrated by the large number of online businesses using it as their database foundation. You can read some of these case studies here:http://www.infobright.com/Customers_Partners/Customers/