Introducing the Vertica Test Drive for Clickstream Analytics

This blog post was authored by Soniya Shah.

Recently, Vertica engineers introduced the new Vertica for Clickstream Analytics test drive on AWS. If you’re a Vertica user, you might be familiar with our test drives on AWS – both run on SQL on Hadoop. One uses MapR and the other uses Hortonworks. With this test drive, you can discover the capabilities of A/B testing through the analysis of clickstream data.

What is clickstream analytics?

Companies with an online presence use clickstream analytics to collect, analyze, and report data about the visitors to the website. The path a user takes to navigate through a site is known as the clickstream. By analyzing clickstream data, you can learn how users interact with your site. Then, using this analysis, you can improve your site to better serve users.

What is A/B testing?

A/B testing compares two versions of a web page to see which version produces more customer conversions. These conversions include any customer interaction on the site that contributes to the company bottom line, including sales, registrations, downloads, and more. With A/B testing, you can change components of the web page such as color, graphics, text or even placement of a call-to-action button, to see which site users respond to. Then, using this data, you can see which version resulted in more customer conversions.

How does the test drive work?

After you have registered, signed up, and confirmed your email address, the test drive gives you free access to a preconfigured Vertica environment for four hours. Then, you can load the data as detailed in the documentation that accompanies the test drive to use Vertica to perform A/B testing on an e-commerce site.

You can view dashboards using Logi Info, a business intelligence tool that provides visualizations of the A/B testing data. For a quick introduction to the test drive, see our Vertica Clickstream Test Drive video.

How do I get started?

Register for the test drive from the AWS site, free of charge. You can launch the test drive anytime, and once the environment is launched, you’ll have four hours to play around with the environment. Read the accompanying documentation for more information about loading the data, creating the clickstream objects, and exploring the before and after data.