Web Analytics Solution

Client

Client Company is a large retailer of electronics merchandise, including computers, computer parts, photo, video equipment and accessories. A considerable amount of the company's business comes from their internet operations via the e-shop portal.

Business Need

Our client wanted to create a web analytics solution to get comprehensive real-time traffic statistics. As a solution, Akvelon created the Web Analytics Solution.

The primary business need for the Web Analytics Solution was to develop and integrate a statistics application into the company’s existent e-store as a custom in-house application. This is necessary in order to meet advanced statistics and report requirements as well as prevent violation of company information security policies (it was forbidden to work with business sensitive information with help of 3d party cloud services like Google Analytics etc).

Solution

The client business is considered the largest in the region, serving several thousand customers per day.

The main concern was to design software that would be able to process large data volumes in real-time mode with a reasonable value of Total Cost of Ownership. This means that classical pure database based solutions would be too expensive in acquisition and maintenance. However, Akvelon managed to design a complex system with an attractive cost-effectiveness ratio.

We designed and developed the solution based on five major software components:

• Stream Data Processor - The Stream Data Processor is designed to perform complex queries and calculate different KPIs based on dense data streams of online customer behavior performance counters. For the Newest Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine, Microsoft StreamInsight was used as a technological platform. It allows analyzing and correlating data incrementally while the data is in-flight - that is, without first storing it, which yields very low latency and eliminates the need to have a complex and expensive data warehouse. Only meaningful data (aggregates, calculated KPIs values etc) are subject to save in the persistent data storage. Another benefit is that the solution can be quickly and effortlessly adjusted to respond to areas of opportunity or threat by incorporating new KPI definitions into the logic of the application, thereby improving operational efficiency and ability to respond quickly to business opportunities.
• Data Storage Subsystem – The Data Storage Subsystem is designed to store historical data, and it uses the Stream Data Processor module as data source. The module implementation relies on power and flexibility from the Microsoft SQL Server relational database.
• Analytics Product - The Analytics Product is designed to monitor statistics and run various types of KPI related reports. The module’s user interface was implemented as a lightweight browser based solution and requires no additional software installed.
  This component has a custom interface to meet beginner and experienced user requirements.
• Notification Product - The Notification Product provides a scalable and flexible mechanism for delivering notification messages (e-mail, SMS) based on predefined KPI related predicates. The notification engine evaluates predicates every time a KPI value is changed. The engine is triggered according to easy, customizable, and flexible rules.
• Admin Product – The Admin Product is developed to supervise and, if necessary, take control of all activities in the system.

Products and Technologies Used

Microsoft StreamInsight, Microsoft SQL Server Database, .Net Framework, Windows Server

Process

Akvelon solution design and implementation included:

• In-depth analysis of business needs based on historical data and brainstorming sessions with company management.
• Road-map arrangement: goals, deliverables, milestones, specifications, estimations, and communications.
• Software design and development.
• IT consulting related to solution implementation.
• System deployment: testing, local demonstration, and solution feedback providing improvements to resolve additional queries.
• Regular communication with the client to provide post-sale services and support.

Benefits and Results

• Customer obtained power tools to optimize online business, which enabled the ability to:
  • Learn more about the visitors
  • Analyze traffic patterns
  • Measure the success of the display, search, new media and offline advertising efforts
  • Get notifications regarding important online business events
• Company’s online business ROI increased
• Reasonable cost of solution ownership in combination with in-house solution safety
• User satisfaction with clear and intuitive application interfaces, useful help, and tutorial features