WebAnalytics

As my first post, I though I write about some hot technical best practices in web analytics. But instead, I thought it best to write about a more fundamental question. One that has been shaping this industry for nearly thirteen years. What is Web Analytics? Well, easy. It's the practice of measurement and monitoring of all that interact with an organization's web properties.

There are two important aspects of this definition. Measurement and interaction.
But what are these measurements? Are these the campaigns, purchases, sign ups, downloads, and conversions? Or page views, visits, and visitors? The answer is all of the above, and much more.


And how about the interaction? The interaction we measure is from visitors. And by visitor, I mean the broad meaning of visitor, which includes crawlers, robots, and spiders.

Until recently, web analytic vendors have been developing tools that measured content navigation. whether it being campaigns, purchases, or conversions, it mostly dealt with granular interaction with content. In the ten to fifteen years life of web analytics, it's only been in the recent years that vendors have started measuring the interactions from the visitor's perspective. From voice of customer to customer experience to performance and up time monitoring, all have entered the web analytics arena. These tools shift the focus from purely content analysis to visitor analysis. Measuring visitor's experience has become popular with online marketing professionals.

Now the question is, whats next for this evolution? What will we measure next?

Steve Bashiri