E-commerce sites heavily utilize analytics to make day-to-day decisions. Analytics evaluates visitors’ data in order to make recommendations and suggest products that might interest customers. This allows for a great cross-sell opportunity. These indications are usually termed recommendation systems in the e-commerce industry, i.e., based on a visitor’s past purchases, other items that have a high propensity of appealing to that visitor are suggested .
For example, a business may find that, historically, athletes who buy pizza and salad also purchase soft drinks. It can subsequently recommend a soft drink to any athlete who buys pizza and salad from its site.
Also, using the information gleaned from specialized analytics, ads being displayed on various sites and search engines can be customized to appeal to specific visitors. Websites rely heavily on visitors’ browsing patterns to come up with site design that can more effectively entice visitors to remain on the site.