Realtime Web Analytics
Cardoso, João (2011)
Cardoso, João
HAAGA-HELIA ammattikorkeakoulu
2011
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2011053110513
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2011053110513
Tiivistelmä
Tracking what is happening on a website in realtime is invaluable. The objective of this thesis was to start and launch the first version of Snowfinch, an open source realtime web analytics application.
The thesis report contains up-to-date fundamentals of web analytics; reasoning behind the most important and difficult technical decisions in the project; product development methodologies; and an overview of the resulting application.
Understanding visitors is the key to a site’s success. Research shows that the amount of insights provided by clickstream data is small in comparison to the amount of data gathered. Even though there is much more to web analytics than clickstream data, the fact is that it is the only data that can be collected and analyzed exclusively by software, thus the need to optimize its use.
With the current use and importance of social media, being able to act quickly is a business differentiator. Visualizing data in realtime is crucial to a fast response. Choosing an appropriate data store plays an important role in the overall performance, responsiveness, and development time of the system.
The development work was sponsored by Kisko Labs Oy. Snowfinch will be used both internally and in client projects. During the development period, it has tracked over half a million page views and approximately two hundred thousand visitors.
Snowfinch may be used by anyone as it is, or it can act as a solid foundation on which to build customized functionality. Being free and deployable inside a private network offers a competitive advantage over commercial alternatives.
The fundamental technologies used are the Ruby programming language, the Ruby on Rails web framework, and the MongoDB document-oriented database. The project was released under the MIT license, a permissive and free software license approved by the OSI (Open Source Initiative).
The thesis report contains up-to-date fundamentals of web analytics; reasoning behind the most important and difficult technical decisions in the project; product development methodologies; and an overview of the resulting application.
Understanding visitors is the key to a site’s success. Research shows that the amount of insights provided by clickstream data is small in comparison to the amount of data gathered. Even though there is much more to web analytics than clickstream data, the fact is that it is the only data that can be collected and analyzed exclusively by software, thus the need to optimize its use.
With the current use and importance of social media, being able to act quickly is a business differentiator. Visualizing data in realtime is crucial to a fast response. Choosing an appropriate data store plays an important role in the overall performance, responsiveness, and development time of the system.
The development work was sponsored by Kisko Labs Oy. Snowfinch will be used both internally and in client projects. During the development period, it has tracked over half a million page views and approximately two hundred thousand visitors.
Snowfinch may be used by anyone as it is, or it can act as a solid foundation on which to build customized functionality. Being free and deployable inside a private network offers a competitive advantage over commercial alternatives.
The fundamental technologies used are the Ruby programming language, the Ruby on Rails web framework, and the MongoDB document-oriented database. The project was released under the MIT license, a permissive and free software license approved by the OSI (Open Source Initiative).