What are the applications of Web Mining?

Web mining extends analysis much further by combining other corporate information with Web traffic data. This allows accounting, customer profile, inventory, and demographic information to be correlated with Web browsing, which answers complex questions such as:

·      Of the people who hit our Web site, how many purchased something?

·      Which advertising campaigns resulted in the most purchases, not just hits?

·      Do my Web visitors fit a certain profile? Can I use this for segmenting my market?

Practical applications of Web mining technology are abundant, and are by no means the limit to this technology. Web mining tools can be extended and programmed to answer almost any question.

Web mining can provide companies managerial insight into visitor profiles, which help top management take strategic actions accordingly. Also, the company can obtain some subjective measurements through Web Mining on the effectiveness of their marketing campaign or marketing research, which will help the business to improve and align their marketing strategies timely.

For example, the company may have a list of goals as following:

·      Increase average page views per session;

·      Increase average profit per checkout;

·      Decrease products returned;

·      Increase number of referred customers;

·      Increase brand awareness;

·      Increase retention rate (such as number of visitors that have returned within 30 days);

·      Reduce clicks-to-close(average page views to accomplish a purchase or obtain desired information);

·      Increase conversion rate (checkouts per visit).

The company can identify the strength and weakness of its web marketing campaign through Web Mining, and then make strategic adjustments, obtain the feedback from Web Mining again to see the improvement. This procedure is an on-going continuous process.

Next, we will give some examples on Web Mining applications.