What's New Table of Contents |
New Products in SAS 9.1.3: SAS Web Analytics 5.0 and 5.1
SAS Web Analytics takes huge volumes of e-data sources and loads them into a flexible Web mart. Business intelligence reports are created by using advanced patent-pending analytics. Information is made available through interactive reporting and visualization tools.
For more information about the current release, see What's New in SAS Web Analytics 5.2.
New Report Interface
A new Web-based report interface in SAS Web Analytics enables users to create their own reports even if they have no programming skills. In addition, reports are easier to locate and customize. Now users can add newly created reports to the system, and reports can be linked to other reports, for a greater exploration of information.
Types of Reports
Reports in SAS Web Analytics are grouped for better accessibility; the reports provide improved metrics and enable more thorough analytics. The following types of reports can be created:
- The Scorecard enables you to monitor strategic Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are related to specific business goals, taking into account seasonality and unobserved patterns. For example, you can create a scorecard to find out the number of people who return to your Web site during a 15-day period.
- The Dashboard provides an early warning system for potential problems or opportunities based on key forecasting metrics in traffic, customer segments, page errors, conversion rates, and other parameters. Dial-type graphical indicators display favorable, unfavorable, and neutral business trends.
- The Segmentation report shows the statistically derived segments (identified groups of Web site visitors) that are analyzed against a business target such as total revenue or total number of new memberships. Segmentation reports show what metric defines the segments of a population with the highest propensity to contribute to the business target. Customer segmentation enables you to determine who your most profitable and least profitable customers are, and it helps you to more specifically target your ads and your Web content.
- Dynamic Funnel Analysis reports enable you to track visitors as they change levels of identification during successive visits to your Web site. For example, customers can be tracked when they initially view your Web site anonymously, when they become registered visitors, and again when they become buyers. Funnel analysis also calculates the drop-off rate of visitors for specific online processes (a process is a predefined set of consecutively visited pages).
- Pathing Analysis reports enable you to better understand how customers traverse the site.
Improved Analytic Capabilities
- Now you can report on search keywords, banner ads, and referrals, and use this information to motivate customers to view your Web site, to reduce the costs of e-marketing campaigns, and to achieve ROI objectives.
- The Report wizard enables you to easily build a custom report and preview it without having to load the data and run all the reports concurrently, as was required in earlier releases.
- The SAS System automatically detects and parses the most common Web logs: CLF, ELF from Apache, iPlanet from Sun Microsystems, and IIS from Microsoft.
- A patent-pending algorithm identifies unique sessions and ensures the accurate reconstruction of sessions to deliver accurate reports.
- The metadata-driven Web mart structure is newly designed for the SAS Web Analytics solution. Although the structure uses the familiar summary tables, the open architecture now enables you to introduce custom tables and third-party data as part of your Web mart.
- The LSF scheduler, which enables you to easily schedule the ETL batch processes, is included in the SAS Web Analytics solution.
- The SAS Web Analytics solution uses a multi-tiered architecture to improve performance. The extraction, transformation, and loading processes occur on a backend server, while content delivery is performed on a middle-tier server.