To begin - a definition of Web Analytics - the capture and analysis of a site's clickstream data. The process of understanding customer experience, morphing your site to best serve your customer.
Avinash's Trinity Method - Understanding "Why" "What" and "How"
To begin any sort of strategy, begin collecting data. Use a free tool. There's 50,000 free tools out there, don't spend any money trying to understand your site if there is nothing to begin with. Start putting the data in front of your marketers. Use the data, make some great decisions on marketing strategies, understand your audience, and don't fall into the bad cycle of collecting everything - "Garbage in, Garbage out." Over time, your organization is going to get smarter, and the tool will begin to be limiting. Then you look into paid tools. But always try to adhere to the 10/90 method - invest 90% of your business intelligence money into a person to analyze the data and 10% in an analytics tool. Megan Burns from Forrester released a study on the ROI of analytics staff and it comes out to something like 5,000% ROI. So start looking for intelligent analyst(s)!
Are Page Views Dead?
In some ways, yes. Page Views are dead in Silicon Valley. With the adoption of flash and ajax sites - event based tracking is coming into play. How do we measure the experience instead of just page views? There's a new concept of measuring "visitor engagement" - assigning values to different tasks that can be performed during a visit, and quantifying visits/segment behaviors. Web Analytics vendors are going to have to change their product plans and strategies to support the new thought process.
In my consulting experience, there is a huge (read - HUGE) need for post implementation analysis for event based tracking. A successful RIA analytics implementation is great, but corporations then have a need to understand what all the event counts mean. Building out a reporting "center" that pulls from these event lists and provides meaningful information on visits and experience is a huge undertaking but will make event based tracking worth the time and effort of implementation.
(video credit: http://www.podtech.net/home/2929/kicking-off-a-web-analytics-strategy-for-your-corporate-web-program)
