Instrumentation of Websites

If you want to successfully mine useful data from your web logs, you should carefully instrument your websites. Garbage in, Garbage out. Parameters in the URL can be easily mined, but they should be standardized across all your websites or properties. This will simplify the Business and Customer Intelligence mining process and increase accuracy.

Somethings to Track:
1. Page Views
2. User Session
3. Click Through Path
4. Entry, Exit pages
5. External Reference Views
6. IP addresses - > Reverse lookup general location of user
7. Page mapping to business owner
8. Logical Page Groupings
9. Hosting Servers and their Geographical Locations, if your distributed
10. Original Web log File that this information came from
11. Passthrough parameters to be further processed and mined by the business specific to a given website.

Business Drowning In Customer Information, Yet Don't Understand Their Customers

From my personal experience in database development over the years of my career, I have seen many businesses suffer from information glut without a means to quickly and cheaply mine their data. A single business can lose Terabytes of data every day without ever relinquish its secrets and benefiting its owner with its hidden treasures.

Businesses may or may not even know what they are looking for other then they want to make money. First they must understand what their goal is as business or business unit. Figuring out their target customers and understanding them is a start. You'd be surprised that there are many businesses that really don't understand there own customer. It is sad to see highly educated people missing this very point by being distracted by their own ego or self interests.

So to begin with: Do a use case model of your customers. Really get to know them well.

Sources that you can turn to in understanding your customer: Customers themselves, WebLogs (Use Logs), Sales/Subscription Accounting books, Customer Service Logs/Emails, and Questionnaires and Polls.