What is Actually Taking Place on Web Sites: E-Commerce Lessons from Web Server Logs

摘要

A prime business concern is knowing your customer. One legacy carried into the present from the earliest NCSA web servers is web server logs. While there are more powerful user tracking techniques, such as requiring logins or storing cookies, server logs remain a powerful tool in helping understand customer activity on a web site, and are the only tool when logins are not desirable or cookies are blocked by browsers or firewalls. This paper details the possibilities and pitfalls in using web server logs to understand customer behavior on a web site. Described here is the information recorded by the server, and what legitimate inferences can be made from that data. Special emphasis is given to case studies that demonstrate the interactions of the protocols HTTP and HTML, and how weaknesses in the current specification can confound the recorded data and lead to an incorrect analysis.