The Web Analytics Company Project

The company humbly started two years ago and went to the resources that were there; it was not much of a company. Situated in a one room office and just a couple of computers and network devices was not much to catch the eyes of many at first sight. However, this was not a deterrence; there was a 10 man team behind it that was highly motivated, visionary of the future and had a never given up attitude. After employing one hundred and twenty percent efforts, working sleepless nights, scouring the globe for customers and ensuring quality work is given back to clients, the company grew astonishingly fast. The speed of growth prompted the management to move up to a one-floor office and add on board more skilled person that subscribed to the team spirit, vision and mission.

The new team, resources, and big office seemed to be more than enough. The now attained status enable the company to attract more and more clients. The luxury of resources lying around and some workers being unoccupied was short-lived. This was a good response that the company got from the market. That is when a crucial decision was made, 20 lions-hearted men swore to exploit their full potential in attracting, doing more quality work and offering the best services customers could ever expect in analytics. This rekindled the team spirit and opened a bright new page to the company. Customers were trickling in; more equipment had to be acquired to support the immense number of duties that were rising every day. The team was fine, worked well under heightened pressure and always ensured optimum quality of work under the available resources.

Revenues trickled in and within two years from a humble beginning, the company was standing tall boasting of being a multi-million dollar company. The exact figure stands at about twenty-five million dollars net worth and certainly that number is enormous for a sub-two-year company. As was observed in the beginning, the company was meant for great places, an estimated growth of 60% was observed to come by eighteen months into the future.

The company ventures in web analytics business. Web analytics involves digging into large amounts of data from businesses to discover patterns, relations and marry the improbable. This enables the company to give back to clients’ refined and well-organized information about customer behavior. This information is very helpful to the client companies. It helps them optimize their marketing plans; part of the analytics job is to suggest these plans. Also, customers get to know more about customer needs and expectations thus can develop more product plans. The information was given to the clients also include suggestions on improvements on customer care, aesthetics of their websites and other nitty gritty. Web analytics typically involves a lot of work all aimed at finding more visitors to visit client sites and boosting client sales by monitoring visitors or customers behavior and the suggesting how to exploit them fully.

Other companies do not have the resources regarding time, equipment, software or mind power the analytics company has to do thorough web analytics. That is why they entrust and employ the power of the analytics company to do the work of finding gems from mud. Currently, the company takes data from clients’ sales databases, website content, back-end code, front end design code and sales funnels. Currently, the company is working with 100 companies in the county and 30 others who have offshored their analytics work.

There are four dedicated information systems personnel in the company. One of them is a 25-year-old, computer science graduate named Arnold Pichaii. Pichaii is responsible for analyzing front end design of websites to evaluate their aesthetics and suggest improvements. The second one is a 35-year-old, master’s degree in software engineering holder called Mark Zuck. Zuck looks at the more complicated back-end codes and is well experienced in that field. The third one is the 27-year-old lady called Courtney Kim. Kim holds a bachelor’s degree in IT and is responsible for content analysis. Lastly, thoroughly analyzing the data in sales databases and coordinating efforts of the other IT staff is Jong Kim, CIO, and holder of a master’s degree in IT.

The company generally collects as much user information as technologically possible. First, the company collects user demographic information, where the users visit the websites being analyzed from. This data is used to source secondary information about the type of market, weather data, dense or sparse population and other geographic and meteorological information. Also, the device used to access the website is checked, the OS together with the app used. This information is used to determine the user interface design of a website to tailor it to the devices used by visitors.

Secondly, customer behavior patterns once on a site are observed. Data such as the pages a particular user visit, how long does the customer stay on each page and what the visitor searches for in the website is recorded (Iyer& Raman, 2011). This data helps the company analyze what customers look for and whether it is available on the site and contributing factors to a customer’s longer stay on a given page as compared to others. Also, placement of content for visibility to customers is determined from this data.

Thirdly, E-commerce data is collected. This data includes what the customer buys, what commodities customers buy bundled together with others, what products are bought most, categories of products being bought, preferred methods of payment and all purchases made by the same customer (Duan&Xiong, 2015). Analyzing this information gives data about the stocking of some commodities, advertisement plans, marketing plans and product plans. Also, this information is used to give new customers suggestions when they buy certain products.

Apart from customer data, website data is also recorded. The loading speeds for each page are recorded. The aesthetics of each page are analyzed. The content and key words in the website content for each page are analyzed. The placement of ads on the website is also analyzed and recorded. This information is used to improve the visibility of the site to search engines, modify web content to match what customers are searching for in search engines and how best to improve revenues from third party adverts on the site through more impressions and clicks.

A lot of data has to be poised and analyzed. The following are some of the essential tools that make this possible:

Operating Systems and Databases

The company machines run on Microsoft Windows 8. This is because data analysts are not necessarily software developers. Therefore, a user-centered OS serves them as good as it serves other staff.

The company relies on graphical databases to store the collected information. This is because the graphical databases store better customer and visitor information and the retrieval speeds of the information are quite higher as compared to relational databases when given the same task. Specifically, Neo4j is the database system used.

Analytics and Interfaces

The company relies on trusted software that has intelligent algorithms to find relationships and patterns in scrambled information. Multiple analytics software tools are employed. They include SPSS, Mat Lab, SAS predictive analysis, IBM predictive analysis and Rapid Miner.

The company has a well-built user interface on its site that enable customers to upload their data, chat with customer care and view their reports. The interface is responsive and is based on flat user interface design.

Infrastructure and Security

Security being a key concern both to clients and the customer is well handled. Multiple redundant systems are in place to protect the company systems. There are firewalls in place protecting the company intranet, intrusion detection and prevention systems have also been installed to thwart intrusions by attackers, client information is encrypted with a complex algorithm, the website uses https, and lastly, all the staff is specially trained to foil user-targeted attacks such as phishing and social engineering.

The company relies on trustable infrastructure to enable smooth operation even in handling huge chunks of information. Core i7, 8GB RAM, and 2GB are the standard specifications for all computers and laptops used by the company to process the data. The network is established by two routers, four switches and 4 wireless routers that ensure every corner of the building is connected. The wireless networks are secured using WPA2.