Currently used by some of the largest websites and portals

Introduction

The Web
Having a presence on the web is very much an integral part of a company's business in today's competitive global market. The Internet is one of the most powerful platforms for advertising your products, supporting your customers and reaching a growing community. To illustrate the importance of this medium, consider the projection that by 2006 there will be close to a billion Internet users.

It shouldn't be overlooked, however, that the internet is still very much in its infancy. As we know, ongoing maturity inevitably brings about changes in values, requirements as well as adding new challenges to day to day life.

From the web's inception, industry has been challenged with the prospect of measurability. Right now this is frequently in the form of attempting to obtain accurate and flexible business reports from large and complex data sources. Traditional approaches provide basic statistics, which are really only useful to the site maintainer and rarely address a marketing department's business needs. Heavily customised solutions that are currently available as a one off project, typically involve significant implementation, integration and maintenance, subsequently pushing the cost out of reach of the majority of businesses.

The PAU Solution
Anderson Harvy Ltd has developed an innovative product solution (PAU™) that is based on industry available tools and techniques that provide flexible business user reporting to the busy marketing and eCommerce functions, removing the very involved and expensive procedures of integrated Data warehousing products.

The PAU™ Solution is based on the acquisition and processing of web log data and presenting this to a relational database in a format suitable for analysis and subsequent reporting that is user friendly to the business users as well as the site maintainer.

PAU™ - The Marketing Business Solution
PAU™ enables the marketer to integrate the main elements linking Customers with Influences and Traffic to better understand the effectiveness of the website advertising and processes.

How It Works

The Fast, Flexible and efficient PAU™ System that guarantees results.

Flexible - Support for all log formats
The PAU™ application of acquisition and processing software is fully flexible, which allows it to support most data formats and current, standard web log format files. This flexibility provides future proofing should new web log formats be introduced, as well as allowing the data to be formatted to be suitable for other analytical tools.

Efficient - Manages large data volumes
One of the key issues to overcome is the sheer volume of data generated. PAU™ addresses this with a combination of compression techniques and eliminating unutilised data. The result is a database of a manageable size with reasonable query response times.

The PAU Process

Web Log Acquisition
The Acquisition application processes raw web logs into composite files containing all the data in a compressed format along with descriptive metafiles used in downstream processing.

Web Log Processing
Following Acquisition the composite files are processed in a variety of ways in preparation for loading into a relational database. Defined and configured using a XML configuration file combining flexibility within a rigid structure.

Database Design & Reporting
This element of the architecture is the database design, which PAU™ generates in a standard layout for the marketer that is in line with the majority of data warehouse applications. This provides ease and speed of reporting as well as simple integration with other data sources.

Another benefit to the marketer is that PAU™ is that it allows users to choose the delivery format (e.g. Excel spreadsheets) that best suits their individual requirements.

Finally, PAU™ supports a large number of standard reports but a simple database schema is used allowing additional report development to be straightforward and flexible.

Customer Profiling

When customers can be identified from the web log data it is possible to profile them to try and understand more about them, which will help in planning future campaigns or personalisation.

Summary

The key element to the PAU™ application is the simple flexibility of its architecture. Subsequently, the impact on both business users and operations staff is kept to a minimum. Workshops are run with users to define reporting requirements, whilst AHL work with operations to identify the most effective way of sourcing the necessary data, including specific requirements lists of the data that must be captured.

Delivery Options

Pau can either be provided as a product run and maintained by the customer or a managed service where AHL process and supply the resulting reports directly to the required business functions.

A typical client engagement process is shown in the following diagram: