Recent business development in connection with the present state of world economy evokes the managers to make alterations in their decision making. Companies´ managements can make right decisions only with the aid of current and precision information. In addition, managers have to get all information in time. Decisionmaking processes should be realized quickly and under the strong thumb of a competitive environment. Some years ago, for the support of top level of management, information systems development was oriented to decision support systems (DSS). On the present, decision support systems development is transformed to development of business intelligence (BI) systems. Business intelligence technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. In business intelligence, described views are represented by reporting, ad-hoc reporting, OLAP analysis etc. With the aid of business intelligence systems development, managers have more possibilities to choose types and structures of information.


The advent of the PC, the Internet, and ultimately ecommerce, has brought a revolution in business intelligence. However, it has also proven to be a double-edged sword. The sheer volume of information we can gather now is overwhelming for any human team to keep up with, properly analyze, and utilize effectively There is so much information that it becomes unmanageable.

A lot of information is available at low cost or, better yet, for free. I guess we all knew it was headed this way, but we probably didn't anticipate it would come so quickly. We now need computers to analyze our business intelligence for us.

Luckily, computers can go farther than mere rudimentary analysis. With the right business intelligence system, you can have the software decide when to reorder stock at the right time so you won't run out of exactly what you need, based on an analysis of seasonal marketing trends.

What assails businesses today is information overload. What is worse is that many involved in ecommerce are drunk with SEO. They exaggerate the significance of SEO and neglect the real meat of business intelligence. It is true that in your SEO campaign SEO business intelligence is important. But in the normal course of business, SEO plays a small part in the big ecommerce picture.

The only businesses that spend all their time thinking SEO and succeed are businesses that offer SEO services. You've got to get past mere SEO in order to get business started.

Business Intelligence Relevance
To fully appreciate the importance and power of business intelligence, here is a list of questions that it helps you answers. Once you go through this list, you will realize that business intelligence is an absolute necessity for ecommerce.

• Advertising-Effectiveness Related Questions: What source of advertising is pulling in the maximum mount of traffic? Which advertising is generating the most sales? What ad creative is converting best?
• Navigation-Effectiveness Related Questions: What elements of navigation are people using the most? What are they using the least? What is causing visitors to go around in circles? Are they reaching their desired page upon using the search box?
• Loyalty-Related Questions: What customers buy repeatedly? Where did these customers come from? How do they reach their desired products? How many of them respond to mailers and other forms of marketing communication?
• Marketing Plan Effectiveness Related Questions: How price sensitive are customers? What affiliates are sending in the best traffic?
• SEO Related Questions: What keyphrases are sending the best traffic? What strategies are leading to the greatest SEO success?
• Social Marketing Related Questions: Are social sites sending you traffic? What is working in your social media efforts, and what is not? Are you able to generate a return on investment from social media?
• Pay Per Click Strategy Related Questions: What keywords are the best converting? Are your PPC optimization efforts bearing fruit?