In customer relationship management (CRM), Web mining is the integration of information gathered by traditional data mining methodologies and techniques with information gathered over the World Wide Web. (Mining means extracting something useful or valuable from a baser substance, such as mining gold from the earth.) Web mining is used to understand customer behavior, evaluate the effectiveness of a particular Web site, and help quantify the success of a marketing campaign.
Web mining allows you to look for patterns in data through content mining, structure mining, and usage mining. Content mining is used to examine data collected by search engines and Web spiders. Structure mining is used to examine data related to the structure of a particular Web site and usage mining is used to examine data related to a particular user's browser as well as data gathered by forms the user may have submitted during Web transactions.
The information gathered through Web mining is evaluated (sometimes with the aid of software graphing applications) by using traditional data mining parameters such as clustering and classification, association, and examination of sequential patterns.