Online activity records can answer a variety of questions about particular groups of customers, such as what they buy, what pages they tend to visit on the site, and what their tastes are. Companies such as Accrue , digiMine , Coremetrics , NetGenesis , Personify , and MicroStrategy offer software that can analyze the data and turn the result into readable and usable reports. These companies have different specialties. Some are better at counting heads and creating reports that focus on customers' behavior patterns. Many of the products help you group customers who exhibit similar purchasing habits and demographics into segments.
Segments are often far less obvious, though.
Analytics software helps you discover them. Other products are better at monitoring traffic and creating maps of a Web sites' choke points. Several packages exhibit strength in parsing data into activity based on a specific product. Analytics also allows marketers to identify groups of individuals for targeting and testing. A relatively large B2C Web site will get 100 million hits per day.