Clickstreaming and customisation
Customising the pages to individual viewers--and producing dynamic HTML pages--is becoming more commonplace and placing more demand on database systems.
"The challenge now for a lot of sites is to provide tailored content to their users, so customers can enter their details and put in a little bit about what they're interested in," says Paul Marriott, business development manager of Oracle 9i, at Oracle. "So you're already managing data so that the next time the user comes back to the site, they can view the details they want."
This customisation goes a step further when Web sites start collecting information about users in order to learn more about them.
"There is this learning process from the data you can collect through the Web site," says IBM's Paddon. This is where we see what was typically used for business intelligence or data warehousing, now you see Web sites are being extended to do this smart data analysis to learn more. That's one way of building smarter and more customer-oriented Web pages."
"Say I'm a bank and I want to make statements available to my customers over the Web. Now [I] have the opportunity in an abstract way to observe customers coming to the Web site. I can observe what else they look at besides their bank statements. Are they looking at home loans or car insurance?"
Paddon says this means businesses can learn more about their customers, which is sometimes referred to as clickstream analysis. "What that means is later I can come back to the site and have the opportunity to proactively market to this person, and for example lead with a home loan offering when this person looks at a statement."
"This means gathering quite a lot of information you don't have in your transaction system. The only thing the transaction system knows about is the last time you visited the ATM. That's a great way of learning about the customers and giving them a better service."
