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! Merchant Solutions 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! Merchant Solutions 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

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.