Web Intelligence

Once viewed as information of interest only to marketing organizations for periodic trend reporting, the data generated by web-facing properties is now being used by more organizations for valuable operational and strategic insights, and specifically to improve the user experience. Measuring web traffic trends such as visitors, visits, page views, etc., is only a small part of site optimization. Optimization of user experience requires a deep understanding of all user interactions on the site, sometimes at a session level. Since customers can interact with your product or company in multiple ways (website, mobile, social, etc.), the amount of data generated from these channels is enormous. Additionally, the data from each source varies - part of the dataset might be completely unstructured, while part might be semi-structured. Combining these disparate data sources through traditional web analytics tools or business intelligence solutions can prove challenging. Part of the challenge is technology (scaling, bringing structure to the data, real-time reporting, etc.) and part of the challenge is cost (moving large data sets to or from third-party providers). The complexity increases significantly for organizations that are looking to create segmentation on the fly and optimize user experience using real-time insights into the data.

Splunk's strengths of scalability, unlimited segmentation and its ability to drill from dashboard to the session-level data to provide real-time insights into the data can help solve your web intelligence challenges. Splunk requires no instrumentation and works as far back as you have logs, enabling you to pivot on the data in any way you want (compared to schema-based approaches), and provides full, audit-able drill-down to the original events. Understand specific online shopping patterns, quickly find problems with e-commerce sites, correlate poor customer experience and lost revenue to network latencies, find out why consumers are dropping off the site before revenue-generating advertisements are served. The list goes on. Splunk gives you the means to get the answers you need in real time, even for sites generating terabytes of data a day.

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Key challenges organizations face:

• Ad hoc analysis - Large data volume and changing business needs have increased the need for ad hoc analysis with the ability to explore data easily through segmentation and historical trending
• Third-party integration - Multi channel reporting and insights are needed for identifying user behavior. Data stitching is time consuming and painful. Batch processing can further delay analysis, leading to missed business opportunities
• 360 degree customer view - Understanding detailed customer profiles and creating micro segments are a prerequisite for effective marketing campaigns and customer retention
• Operational efficiency - Changes in search algorithms and ever-increasing user expectations (for speed and better website experience) are forcing better site uptime, response time and reducing website errors

Conduct Ad hoc Analysis

Splunk's powerful search language and unlimited segmentation makes it very easy for an analyst to ask any question and conduct deep dive analysis. Full data drilldown at a user or session level makes analysis more insightful and actionable.

Integrate Third-Party Data

Splunk can ingest, combine and correlate all types of machine-generated data in real time. This is a tremendous asset for organizations that are looking to extend their analysis beyond Clickstream data. The late-binding schema makes it easier to introduce and correlate new data sources.

Better Customer Intelligence

High performing marketing programs need a deep understanding of their customers and customer segments. Understand what channels or incentives create a customer conversion or a more engaging user experience. Having access to detail-level data at a user and session level enables the creation of detailed customer profiles. Splunk indexes and makes user and session level data available in real time. The data can be searched, aggregated and segmented easily.

Drive Operational Efficiency

Site performance is one of the most overlooked but highly valuable metrics for website analysis. Understanding website speed and availability helps optimize user experience, as well as search efficiency - SEO rankings and SEM spend. Splunk helps organizations drive operational efficiency by providing insights into their website infrastructure and reducing the time to discover and resolve site performance issues variances.

Simply put, web intelligence is Web Analytics plus Operational Intelligence - more powerful for insightful and actionable insights.

Key Benefits