You should all read a truly insightful article entitled Data Mining And Predictive Analytics On Web Data Works? Nyet!
The issues are:
- Type of Data:
- Number of Variables
- Multiple Primary Purposes
- Multiple Visit Behavior
- Missing Primary Keys, Data Silos, Lack of Holistic Datasets
- Massive Pace of Change on the Web
As the author states:
My post (attempts) to cover any website on the planet and taking millions of clicks and visits data, mostly anonymous if not all of it, and then trying to do predictive analytics on top of that. I realize that some of the people on those sites will buy and in that way share their data and that is of some value. But traditional predictive analytics used in offline words is not the most optimal investment. For now. Things will change in due course.
Many/Most nonprofit organizations aren’t performing this type of analysis of their data. It looks to me like most organizations shouldn’t.