The Old Way vs. The Skytide Way:
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- Beyond Web Analytics: Analytics and Reporting for Real Business Results
- Skytide Application Sets for Online Content Delivery
While every industry and company has unique data information requirements, the following scenario demonstrates the value of multiple data sources to better inform business decisions and actions for any enterprise or service provider generating online content.
The Business Model: Online Content Delivery & Sales
This sample media company generates revenue by selling online content to end-users, which could include music downloads, live and downloads of video, and live Flash presentations. Customers access content through a password protected user account, with automated billing per content item viewed. In addition, the media company delivers a range of online ad formats for its partners, ranging from graphic banners to flash videos.
The data landscape includes the following:
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Neither traditional BI nor web analytics tools are capable of transforming this type of online content traffic data into meaningful information. Here’s why:
- BI Tools: All of the data from each continuous stream would need to be transformed and placed in a structured relational database/data warehouse. The volumes of the network traffic alone make this impossible to achieve if timely results are expected. Using traditional BI tools for this analysis process would also require extensive storage, processing power, licensing costs, and time. This method is also inherently inflexible when dealing with ad hoc queries, new data sources, and changing business metrics. BI in this new data environment isn’t scalable, flexible, timely, or affordable.
- Web Analytics: The complexity of multiple large volume data streams is not possible using web analytics tools, which are limited to HTTP click-stream analysis. Web analytics work to provide insight into the online interactions, but the view remains one dimensional and leaves out details about how users interact with content. And, because web analytics also requires changes to the HTML web page, the process requires additional labor. It remains inflexible, and marginally scalable.
With Skytide, the organization can maintain a constant tap on all data streams, at the highest dimensional view. Here’s how:
Skytide Results: Skytide is deployed as described above, allowing seamless merging of the following data sources: Windows Media Server log files, Customer information records in CRM and Finance System, Ad Traffic Server, HTTP Web Analytics Files. This results in the automated generation of reports that answer key business and IT-related questions including:
- Identify the top 10 viewed content titles and media types
- Calculate average view time across different media types and content titles
- Show Sales and billing revenue across customers and aggregated by region
- Identify top 10 error messages related to media type and player (?)
- Demonstrate ad traffic views segmented by user demographics linked to associated content
- Calculate and trend ad revenue by publisher over time, segmented by top producers
- Click Here to Review Sample Reports
Conclusion
Business that depend on the network as a primary channel for delivering their products and services, and those that rely on the network to reach potential customers or drive internal processes, have a wealth of information hidden in the volumes of data these networks generate. Unlocking the true value of this data will be critical in sustaining revenue over time.
Find out more!
Contact Skytide today to see how Skytide can help you unlock the value hidden in your volumes of network data. Email us at info@skytide.com or call 650-292-1900