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.



    Web Site Measurement Hacks
    Web Site Measurement Hacks: Tips & Tools to Help Optimize Your Online Business
    ISBN: 0596009887
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2005
    Pages: 157

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