Profitability Across Channels Including Web
After the DW/BI team successfully implements the initial clickstream fact tables and ties them to the sales transaction and customer communication business processes, the team may be ready to tackle the most challenging subject area of all: web profitability.
You can tackle web profitability as an extension of the sales transaction process. Fundamentally, you are allocating all the activity and infrastructure costs down to each sales transaction. You could, as an alternative, try to build web profitability on top of the clickstream, but this would involve an even more controversial allocation process in which you allocate costs down to each session. It would be hard to assign activity and infrastructure costs to a session that has no obvious product involvement and leads to no immediate sale.
A big benefit of extending the sales transaction fact table is that you get a view of profitability across all your sales channels, not just the web. In...