Category list

Acknowledgments

This book would not have ever happened if not for the efforts of all of my contributors, colleagues, and friends in the web measurement industry: people like Bryan Eisenberg, Jim Novo, and Jim Sterne, who are always happy to provide guidance; Jim MacIntyre, Jeff Seacrist, Bob Page, and Brett Hurt for technical assistance; and Jason Burby and Dylan Lewis for ongoing support.

My extreme gratitude goes out to each of the vendors who provided screenshots and information for the book, including Jane Palocci at Coremetrics, John Mellor at Omniture, Corey Gault at WebTrends, Brett Crosby at Urchin, Erik Brat at WebSideStory, Jay Rudman at OpinionLab, Roger Benyon and Tom Cherry at Usability Sciences, and, of course, all of my contributors. Thanks is also due to the CEOs and VPs of marketing at many of the vendors , including Jeff Lunsford, Joe Davis, Greg Drew, Jim MacIntyre, Josh James, John Marshall, Jim Rose, and Ram Srinivasan for letting their people take the time to contribute content and ideas.

Tremendous credit goes to Andrew Odewahn, my editor at O'Reilly Media, for being patient and understanding and for his enthusiasm about this work.

Thanks to Tim O'Reilly and Rael Dornfest for taking a chance on a book about web measurement in the first place.

Special thanks to Ross Jenkins, Ian Houston, Terry Lund, and Josh Manion for taking the time to provide excellent technical reviews of the book. Trust me, the information quality of this entire book is better for the time these four gentlemen spent.

Thanks to JupiterResearch and David Schatsky for being open to the idea of my writing a book about web measurement.

Both Dr. Stephen Turner and Ian Houston have my eternal gratitude for taking the time to write the "build your own" hacks, which turned out to be more work than any of us imagined, but have provided, in my opinion, a handful of the most valuable hacks in this book. Thanks to Dr. Turner, the original "web site measurement hacker," for providing the foreword to this book.

Thanks to Amity, my best friend and most ardent supporter, for helping me create an environment where writing was possible and encouraging me whenever I became lazy or uninspired.

Finally, thanks to Chloe Michelle Peterson, who from age 18 months to 22 months was so sweet and understanding that " daddy had to write."

Preface

When the Internet was first born, most of us were so delighted with the ability to share information across great distances with relative ease that we gave little thought to critical analysis of how that information was being consumed. With the advent of the modern browser giving way to not just information but nice-looking information, our delight only magnified. Like children in a sandbox, we built sites, added images and content, and told everyone who would listen, "Hey, you! Come to my web site. My web site is great!"

At some point, somebody asked if anyone was coming. Nobody knew the answer.

The tools had not been developed, nor the practices established, to understand how people were interacting with these rapidly emerging web sites. The direct mailing crowd had cut their teeth on square inch analysis and DMA zones, and the television and radio folks had their Nielsen and Soundscan data. Physical stores had Underhill, his planograms, and spying college students. Even telesales operations had a notion of how well received their outgoing message was, based on the number of hang-ups they were getting.

Web site operators had nothing more than the occasional webmaster@ email saying someone liked the site and was it OK to copy their code.

Enter web site measurement.

In 1993 at Honolulu Community College, an enterprising young man (Kevin "Kev" Hughes, for the record) wrote and announced getsites 1.4, a simple web server log analyzer (Figure P-1).

All of the sudden, anyone with a reasonable knowledge of C and their local filesystem could finally see what pages people were looking at. It was basic at best, but it opened the floodgates for what is predicted to become a billion dollar industry by 2009.

Figure P-1. Announcement of getsites 1.4

In 2005, web measurement applications are as important to the Internet business framework as web servers and commerce engines. Few serious businesses spend money online without having a tool in place to measure the effect of that expenditure, providing data for critical analysis of the question "Was that money well spent?" Today, companies like WebTrends, Omniture, and Visual Sciences routinely close deals worth hundreds of thousands of dollarsall so companies can understand who is coming to their sites, where they're coming from, and what they're viewing in an effort to understand "why."

It is those questions we hope to answer in Web Site Measurement Hacks .