Online businesses possess high volumes of web traffic and transaction data. Often valuable data regarding visitor opinions and attitudes towards the service and the website itself are also available by means of online surveys. Additionally, sociodemographic data can provide characteristics of the audience, help differentiate between customer segments and understand drivers of loyalty with respect to each segment. Faced with the potentially rich body of the three kinds of information, companies urgently seek intelligent methods to analyze data in an efficient and insightful manner. The contribution of the present work consists of the introduction of an innovative and promising method for the joint analysis of all these data of the aforementioned dimensions that results in meaningful and valuable marketing knowledge. At the same time, the suggested solution yields also interesting practical results helping to better understand what is really going on at the website.
This paper falls into two main sections: In the first, some brief account is given, as background, of the history of joint readership research in Britain, of the present administration of the National Readership Survey and of Its methods, content, financing and data access. The second main part of the paper discusses some present problems of the NRS, but does not concern Itself with technical questions. The views expressed throughout are those of the author but not necessarily of JIGNARS officially.