Another vertical for which we see adoption of data warehousing is the Online Marketing space (Web/clickstream analytics). Market analyst Curt Monash notes that “web analytics – and specifically clickstream data — is one of the biggest areas for high-end data warehousing.”

The spend on online marketing analysis is growing significantly (from about $6B in 2002, projected to $40B in 2011). This growth is driven by companies who are looking to manage their marketing spend more effectively: understanding who buys, figuring out where they come from and what interests them, and promoting their products to the best fit targets. Marketing analysis companies provide these insights to their clients by analyzing online behavior (tracking customer origins, clicks and site-to-site movement, lengths of stays, etc.).

Not surprisingly, collecting and analyzing this data has huge technical issues, not least of which is the staggering volumes of data that needs to be captured and analyzed. Plus, the data needs to be analyzed as close to real-time as possible in order to facilitate the need for rapid response to campaigns and specific targeting. Worse, with the huge growth rate in the space comes added competition. That drives the need for online marketing firms themselves to target and differentiate the offerings, requiring deeper analytics across more granular data—in short, even more data to deal with, and even more ad-hoc analytics.

Beyond needing to store large amounts of data for unpredictable ad-hoc analysis, this is also a young market. Most companies are 5 years or less in business. They are seeing insane growth leaving them resource constrained, so they need high-volume, low-cost solutions that need as little maintenance as possible.

All in all, a good fit for ICE.

Some additional reading on the subject can be found here:

http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/
http://data-warehouses.net/webanalytics/dimensional.html