Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

25.1. What Is Web Analytics?

Web Analytics is the analysis of web data. More specifically, it is business intelligence that allows analysts to gain insight into their web-based businesses (for example, e-commerce, customer support, and so on). Web Analytics allows you to understand customer behavior and identify common sales trends so you can personalize services for your customers and increase customer satisfaction. With it, you can understand how well your products, content, and online processes are working.

The difficulty of Web Analytics is that it requires you to combine different sources of data and correlate the data to resolve these issues. With the complexity of web sites, offerings, multiple locations, and promotions, it is difficult to answer even the most basic questions concerning these online businesses. For example, to answer the question "How well did our web promotion work?" you will need to:

• Transform web log data to determine the number of users who visited the site due to the promotion.

• Transform commerce data to determine the number of users who made purchases due to the promotion itself.

• Associate the commerce data to the web log data to include only purchases that were made due to those promotions.

• Transform banner ads and email marketing campaign data to determine the number of users who actually received the promotion.

• Correlate all this data.

To answer the previous question, you need to transform three completely different data sources (web log data, commerce ...