In the days of the cavemen (Web 1.0), we measured page views, hits and click thru rates. Clickstream analysis and browser tags followed this. There was great debate in the mid 90′s over which method provided a better ROI tool for measurement – browser tagging winning out. In 1999 the web analysis market preported to be around 150 million was growing by 200%. By 2000 it reached 400 million. The leading companies to emerge were Web Trends, Accrue and an interesting company Net Genesis. They were part of a prolific group of 60 + web analytic vendors.

Marketing Buzz today now centres around Coremetrics, Omniture, Web Trends and Webside story. What was once a technolgy focused market has now matured to becoming a process driven market. Businesses are interested in how web analytics can foster greater online presence in an integrated way that considers search, categorization, personalization, and multi-channel analysis.

As we move more into the exciting future of universal search advertisers will look to web analytics to measure interaction, creative, reach, recency and conversion. Recognizing the whole experience and measuring all the touch points, including how offline media contribute at various stages along the conversion funnel, will become increasingly more important in effectively measuring ROI.

Kristen Nomura, Search and Analytics Marketing Manager at Google, indicates that advertisers need to sometimes look beyond just conversion. They need to look at all the things they are doing higher and lower in the conversion funnel, then take a leap to conversion.

While she has a point success will also be determined by establishing clear KPIs.