The future of web analytics is certainly a shift of focus from reporting metrics to mining interesting information by applying statistical and machine learning techniques to web logs. In other words, web analytics will increasingly become “web-log mining“.

In this post, I compile some of the most pioneering research papers that will shape up web analytics in years to come. As you will see, some of the papers are more than 10 years old. This shows that academia has long been doing interesting research in web analytics and will also make you realize just how basic our existing web analytics capabilities are. So, get ready dive into the future of web analytics:

Review / Introduction

• Review: Web usage mining: Discovery and applications of usage patterns from web data
• Recommended: Discovering internet marketing intelligence through online analytical web usage mining
• Great Introduction: Web mining: Information and pattern discovery on the world wide web
• Compilation of Techniques: Mining interesting knowledge from weblogs: a survey
• Another Compilation of Techniques: Web usage mining as a tool for personalization: A survey

Applications / Techniques

• Technique: Mining access patterns efficiently from web logs
• Application in personalization: Web mining for web personalization
• Technique: Finding generalized path patterns for web log data mining
• Application: Mining web logs to improve website organization
• Application in ecommerce: Integrating e-commerce and data mining: Architecture and challenges
• Technique: Improving the effectiveness of a web site with web usage mining

Examples / Implementations

• An Example of mining: Mining web access logs of an on-line newspaper
• Tool: Wum: A web utilization miner
• Tool: WebSIFT: The web site information filter system
• Tool: KOINOTITES: A web usage mining tool for personalization

Hope you liked the list. If you know any specific paper that I may have missed, please leave a comment. I will add it in the list.

Posted in Conversion Optimization on August 25th, 2010 | No Comments »