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Click Trails can show what customers looked at as they browsed through your site. The
patterns of activity can show you how to fine-tune your site to make the most money out
of it.
Trails record the activity of Yahoo! Store's webservers as they serve pages to browsers. Based on logs
of what pages were served when to whom, the system can reconstruct the activity of individual
customers browsing through your site.
Paleontologists want to know, "What did the dinosaurs do?". Unfortunately, all they can see are
fossilized footprints. Getting from one to the other takes some interpretation. Similarily, you want
to know what your customers looked at. Unfortunately, all that is known is what pages were
fetched from Yahoo! Store's servers. However, you can glean a great deal of useful information from
this data.
Why isn't the record of pages fetched from the server the same as what customers looked at?
There are several reasons.
- Browser Caching
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When browsers fetch pages from the web, they save a copy on the
local disk. If they go to the page again, it can be reloaded from disk
much faster than from across the network.
Unfortunately, this means that looking at cached pages is not
recorded in the trail. In the default setting, Netscape will
contact the server for cached pages that haven't been looked at since
the browser was started. So browser caching usually just causes pages not
to be shown twice in the same trail.
- Proxy Servers
- A proxy server is an intermediary between a customer's browser and
the webserver. Proxies cause three kinds of trouble.
- First, when multiple customers use the same proxy, it is usually
impossible to distinguish between the two customers. Thus, the trails
for multiple customers are interleaved. This is often a problem for
AOL, which makes heavy use of proxies.
- Second, proxies cache pages. Thus, if one customer looks at a
particular item, and then another customer (using the same proxy)
looks at the same item a few hours later, the second customer's
activity may not show up in the trail.
- Third, some browsers are configured to distribute their activity
among multiple proxies. Thus, the activity of a single customer may
be separated into multiple trails.
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