Tracking Users
What Marketers Really Want to Know
By Dan R. Greening
Marketers don't want to measure raw hits on a Web site. Increasingly, they want to categorize visitors and measure the significant things those visitors do on the site. Many want to track the effectiveness of promotions in real time and make adjustments instantly. They often want to take data about Web activity offline, combine it with their traditional data, mine it, and report on it. They want to improve advertising effectiveness, visitor loyalty, purchase rates, cross-sells, and up-sells. All this is fueling demand for a new generation of Web-site analysis tools that represent visitor behavior in terms that marketers understand.
Web logging was originally designed for Web engineers to diagnose problems and measure total throughput, not to provide insights that could improve the marketing performance of a site. If the data the marketer wants is logged at all, it has to be mapped to a readable form. But the most useful marketing data isn't recorded at all.
For example, the common log format (CLF) written by all Web servers contains only the fields shown in
Table 1. This isn't enough information to identify the referring site, track cookie-connected sessions, or identify page-views (rather than file "hits"). Web-server manufacturers have added mechanisms to log referrer data, but this data is stored differently on the various servers.
The extended common log-file format (ECLF) includes referring pages and cookie identification, but still fails to provide important content and visitor information.
