Based in Seattle, Washington, Allrecipes.com is the leading community-based recipe and meal planning Web site, offering unique tools and resources including:recipes, nutritional information, scaling, menus, tips, shopping lists, culinary ware and news. Founded in 1997, Allrecipes.com makes cooking, learning and shopping easy and fun for everyone from the novice to the experienced cook. Allrecipes.com offers thousands of user-submitted and third- party recipes; RecipeNotes, a free, biweekly e-mail newsletter; and a culinary store featuring hand- selected kitchenware related to the recipes.
Challenge
As a high-traffic Web site, Allrecipes.com must remain in tune with its visitor behavior in order to keep the content compelling, easy to navigate and reliable. We continually update the site, introduce new tools and make new resources available to our users. Accurate and timely usage of information is crucialfor our IT and marketing staff to evaluate the effectiveness of new services and to quickly identify and resolve any problems or bottlenecks on the site. Allrecipes.com initially attempted to tackle the challenge with standard Web log analysis software packages. We quickly found that these software packages were processor-intensive and produced unsatisfactory results. Web log analysis exhausted a tremendous amount of company resources. Output reflected only a minimalskim of the statistics for example, how many pages were served and what pages were the most popular. Manually aggregating more than 500 monthly reports required the efforts of multiple staff members. Reports were typically delayed by two weeks, and the information was often incomplete or vague. Allrecipes.com’s marketing and information technology (IT) staff began evaluating analytic vendors and tools. There were many choices, but few that fit our budget and available resources. One enterprise solution was cost-prohibitive to deploy and maintain. We evaluated an ASP solution that was more affordable, but would have required us to completely re-instrument our site with data tags. No matter how Allrecipes.com looked at these options, they were allfiscally impossible.
Solution
After careful evaluation, Allrecipes.com identified digiMine as the best solution for us because it provides powerful analytics through a cost-effective service. digiMine builds a secure data warehouse and analyzes user behavior, providing us with a complete data asset and decision-support reports. Implementing digiMine’s solution was simply a matter of installing the digiMine Data Slurper software on our Web servers. Each day, the Slurper sends Allrecipes.com’s Web server logs to the digiMine data center over the Internet via a secure, automated process. digiMine warehouses and analyzes the logs and then delivers insightful, intuitive daily reports. digiMine provides the data storage and analysis while Allrecipes.com’s IT and marketing managers gain valuable business intelligence simply by logging on to the reports over the Internet. With digiMine, Allrecipes.com receives a valuable daily snapshot of visitor behavior. For example, Allrecipes.com’s managers can observe which times of the day are the site’s most active, what visitors are searching for most, how visitors came to Allrecipes.com and which site sections and features are most popular. digiMine’s graphicalreports allow Allrecipes.com to accurately measure the effectiveness ofsite functionality and immediately identify unexpected issues and problems. Allrecipes.com was pleased to find that the price of digiMine’s service fit into the company’s budget. While other products and services can cost more than several hundred thousand dollars a year in software licenses in addition to staff time, digiMine’s service is a fraction of that price. With digiMine, we are now able to be proactive with our content management. The analytics from digiMine enable us to understand how customers use our site. digiMine has helped us understand our customers in ways we were not able to before. Consequently, we are able to be more responsive to our visitors’ needs, which is most important to us.
digiMine Services is a fully hosted data warehousing and data mining solution which provides advanced analytics to e-businesses through intuitive, interactive and customizable reports. Reports include analytics on site usage, integrated marketing campaigns, customer information, user action and shopping cart usage.
By: Jennifer Rice
Source: Direct Marketing Review / PDF