Information about customers and their purchasing habits will let companies initiate e-mail campaigns and other activities that result in sales. Good models of customers' preferences, needs, desires, and behaviors will let companies simulate the personal relationship that businesses and their clientele had in the good old days. The foundation of this dream is the log of customer accesses maintained by Web servers. By analyzing customer paths through the data, vendors hope to personalize the interactions that customers and prospects have with them. Companies will customize the home page each customer sees, the responses to requests, and the recommendations of items to purchase.
Vendors can also generate a list of related products.
The business benefits of this customer intelligence are potentially enormous. Even then, extracting meaning is still difficult. Second, many customers are reluctant to have vendors track what they do. Their concern is so great that the government is actively considering privacy regulation to limit Web tracking. To understand the special challenges of clickstream analysis, let's examine the issues in the context of the data-mining process.