Social networks allow people to interact easily with people and share interests and passions. Internet knew how to capitalize this trend letting people to interact and generate content. The results it amazing, just take a look at Alexa´s top traffic websites.

Pageviews, visits and visitors, are apparently the most important metrics for measuring our website performance. Then as much pageviews, visits and visitors we could have as better our site performance is.

Unfortunately this view is not only weak but incorrect.
Those three metrics allow us measuring different kind of things. So if we have a publisher website our main metric is pageview (this is the way it works but is has lot of issues I’ll mention in a future post).

If we are measuring a chat, unique visitor is out metric, because what we do want is people stay in the chat longer and not to come in and come out.

So not all the indicators are KPI’s (key performance indicators), and you make the difference by defining and giving them the correct meaning.

If there is something that revolutioned the internet it is SEM, mainly with google. This company understood that value of relevant content and give the chance to people who generate it to earn some money.

The result is really good, they have a really simple service, that almost anyone with a minimum internet knowledge could handle. Both, adwords and adsence give the users a lot of technical and marketing support (even with very simple e-learning modules).

The fact is that today citizens became publishers, and the the TV raiting war is being emulated but in a different scenario. The objective? Traffic.

Regular citizens start talking about, pagerank, alexa, inbound links, and other different things formerly used only by internet professionals.

Actually the web analytics tools are becaming more and more user friendly. One of the best examples is the new version of google analytics, focused on simplicity instead of flexibility. This is not good or bad, just a fact. Is really hard to get the best of both worlds, and google like most of other providers has taken a desition.

Finally, how high could be the price people pay for traffic? And what’s behind that traffic? But nevermind, anyone cares about it?

p>In more than 10 years of experience I had the chance of trying almost all the well known web analytics tools, and I found some points that in my opinion Web Analytics tools developers must consider for their products.

1- Flexibility: Web Analytics tools are becoming more and more simple but at the same time less flexible. The possibility of manipulate the information inside the tool is a must, and in a lot of cases is not even available an API.
2- Cost: Prices are in general ridiculous. When Google Analytics was launched I thought that prices should decrease but they don’t. So in one hand you have Omniture, Webtrends, Coremetrix and others with unaffordable prices and on the other hand Google analytics for free.
3- Heterogeneous information: every web analytics tool has different technologies and the ones with similar technologies have a different way of processing it, so comparisons became very difficult.
4- Heterogeneous technology: There are two main technologies, “log file analyzers” and “page tagging”, but also hybrid and packet sniffers among others. All seems to be technological correct, but at the same time track and process the information in a completely different way.