Microsoft .NET Server Solutions for the Enterprise
User Interface Support for Improvements
Commerce Server provides several user interfaces that are used in the course of analyzing Web site activity in order to devise improvements to the site. The Analysis category in Business Desk contains two modules related to reporting, and a viewer.
- Reports. The Reports module is used to initiate running a report. There are two types of reports, static and dynamic. Static reports run in the background, and when complete, appear in the Completed Reports module. Dynamic reports are displayed in a browser window and have advanced interactive capabilities.
- Completed Reports. The Completed Reports module is used to view static reports that have concluded.
- Segment Viewer. The Segment Viewer module is used to view different groups of users who share particular characteristics or behavior such as usage trends. Such analysis can be used to make marketing decisions based upon similarities among users.
Commerce Server 2002 includes more than 30 pre-defined reports, most of which are dynamic. Because dynamic reports allow the business manager viewing the report to choose many different ways to examine the available data, each dynamic report can be seen as many different reports all rolled into one. Combined with the ability to customize existing reports define entirely new reports, and export report data in a format compatible with Microsoft Excel, Commerce Server offers a very rich reporting environment.
Commerce Server categorizes reports into the following types:
| Report Category | Reports |
| Product Sales Reports | Buyer Browse to Purchase, Customer Sales, Order Events, Product Sales, Shopping Basket Events |
| Web Usage Reports | Activity by Browser, Directories, Entry Path Analysis, Top Referring Domains by Requests, Top Requested Pages, Usage Summary by Day of Week, Usage Summary by Hour of Day, Usage Summary by Week of Year, Usage Trends |
| Advertising Reports | Ad Reach and Frequency by Date, Ad Reach and Frequency per Advertiser, Campaign Event Summary, Campaign Item Summary |
| User Reports | Distinct Users by Time, New Registered Users, Registered User Properties, Registered Users by Date Registered, User Days to Register, User Registration Rate, User Trends |
| Visit Reports | Entry Pages, Exit Pages, General Activity Statistics, User Visit Trends |
| Diagnostic Reports | Bandwidth Summary, Bandwidth Trends, Hits by HTTP Status, Hits by Win32 Status |
| Query String Reports | Query Strings (multi-value), Query Strings (single value) |
In order for the business managers to be able to run the available reports and analyze the trends they expose, the site administrators must make sure that the corresponding data is routinely imported into the data warehouse from which the reports are derived. The data warehouse is maintained in Microsoft SQL Server, and many of the tasks involved in populating and maintaining the data warehouse are performed using the user interfaces provided by SQL Server. For this reason, the Microsoft SQL Servers node is included in the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) interface that constitutes Commerce Server Manager. Site administrators configure the data warehouse using the Data Warehouse global resource in the Commerce Server Manager node, and import data using the Microsoft SQL Servers node. Data is imported using several SQL Server Data Transformation Services (DTS) tasks designed specifically for importing various types of Commerce Server data.
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