Logging is Marketing's Best Friend

Logging is one of the most basic components of writing software, but receives very little attention when applications are designed. A good logging strategy is designed with many purposes in mind, including application debugging, user audit trail, and security, all of which are valuable from an IT perspective, but there are huge benefits for the entire enterprise if the marketing department adds its own criteria.

Marketing has long relied on log analysis tools such as WebTrends for information about effectiveness of marketing campaigns and website usage. Originally, this class of analysis tools consumed standard web server logs to provide extremely detailed, and valuable, website usage reporting. In the last 15 years, however, websites have changed from hierarchical directories providing static file downloads into fully-featured, client-server, interactive applications. Sure, web servers still churn out standard web server logs that look exactly like they did in 1993, but the information contained therein provides little visibility into what users are really doing. Fortunately, these log analysis tools have adapted to better techniques, such as consuming application-generated, custom log formats and providing page-tagging methods to feed data directly into the tools.

The most basic feature of logging for any purpose is tracking a user's actions, but even such a simple thing can be tricky with asynchronous web applications. Within Web 2.0 applications, there is little or no correlation between the URL of any given request and what the end-user actually sees, so traditional methods based on correlating URL to content. The result is that only truly effective way to track information useful for marketing purposes is to include very specific tracking requirements into the design of the application. Important: it will cost an enormous amount of time and money to retrofit applications to do standardized logging.