Understand Your Problem
The first step to solving a problem is articulating the problem clearly. Common problems Web marketers want to solve are how to target advertisements, personalize Web pages, create Web pages that show products often bought together, classify articles automatically, characterize groups of similar visitors, estimate missing data, and predict future behavior. All involve discovering and leveraging different kinds of hidden patterns.
数据挖掘工具
Targeting. Marketers use targeting to select the people receiving a fixed advertisement, to increase profit, brand recognition, or other measurable outcome. Targeting on the Web must account for different advertising ad space costs. Web sites with valuable visitors typically charge more for ad space. 数据挖掘交友
On sites where visitors register, advertisers can target on the basis of demographics. For example, people living in different parts of the country or visiting different Web sites may have differing propensities to purchase sports-team-branded apparel, gay travel tours, or discount car parts. Therefore, if you target the people most likely to purchase your product, you can reduce your cost for an ad campaign and increase the total profit.
Some sites let you target ads on the basis of IP address, under the theory that DNS registration information or surveys provide the physical location of the IP address. However, because national dial-up ISPs often share a pool of IP addresses, this is not a reliable method. As we say in the business, "Half the U.S. population lives in Vienna, Virginia" (AOL's corporate address). 数据挖掘研究院
Data mining can help you select the targeting criteria for an ad campaign. Web publications have a set of variables by which they can target advertisements. By performing a test ad using "run-of-site" (that is, untargeted) ad space you can associate demographic variables with conversion. People "convert" when they accomplish the marketing goal, such as performing a click-through, purchase, registration, and so on. Data mining can identify the combination of criteria that maximizes the profit. For example, data mining might discover that targeting based on the logical expression
