It started with, "How many hits?" Nobody knew what a hit was, but it sounded cool. It was the Internet and on the Internet, all things were cool. We all assumed it had something to do with how many people looked at our website.

But soon, people asked just what we were talking about and the truth came out. Each graphic on a page registers it's own hit to the server log, making the measuring of hits something utterly useless. We're still trying to find the individual to credit for turning hits into an acronym for How Idiots Track Success. We needed another measuring stick.

Pageviews were the best gauge available for determining popularity, or consumption, or success of a website. Obviously, the more pageviews the better. But, of course, pageviews are fickle. Was that a thousand people looking at one page or one person looking at a thousand pages?

So, naturally, people wanted to know how many people were coming to the site on a given day or month or hour. A bit tricky that, given the problems with people deleting their cookies at varying rates. Nonetheless, unique visitors became the question de jour.

One day, somebody in the IT department downloaded a web server and created the company's first website. Eighteen months later, the marketing department discovered the Web and realized that the company and its products had been presented online by the IT department. The result was shock, horror, and an immediate coup d'état.

Soon, however, the marketing department came back to the IT department looking for help. "What's happening on our website?" they asked.

"What do you want to know?" came the reply.

"What can you tell us?"

"What do you need?"

'What do you have?"

The only means we had to measure out websites was log files. Clickthroughs and pageviews became the coins of the realm. They were thought to represent the number of people visiting the site and the amount of interest those people had in the content on the site. Since then, the ways measure whether your website is doing a good job have grown by leaps and bounds.

Wondering what sorts of web analytics tools are available?
Wondering which ones might be worth a look?

Mashable - Social Networking News - covers 50 of them.
Analytics Toolbox: 50+ Ways to Track Website Traffic

From analyzing your RSS feed to counting page views to visual representations of where your visitors are clicking, there is no shortage of companies looking to help you better understand your web site’s traffic. In our latest “toolbox” installment, we analyze (pun intended) the wide variety of applications and tools available for keeping tabs on how your sites, feeds, blogs, emails, or even your intranet is performing.

Manoj Jasra, Director of Technology at Enquiro Search Solutions posted that attention-getting article on his blog, Web Analytics World

Among them?

• You don’t want to know where your visitors are coming from.
• Who cares what paths visitors take or the length of their paths, as I said earlier, once they arrive, they are going to purchase.
• Your site's probably not going to have repeat visitors anyways because they'll find everything they need the first time around.

Check out 21 Reasons Why You Do NOT Need Web Analytics

People have a very narrow view of web analytics. "That's where they measure the clickthroughs and pageviews, right?"

But that definition is about reporting. Reporting is all about setting up specific KPIs (key performance indicators) and then glancing at the results every now and then.

Analytics is about curiosity. (Great article about this by Neil Mason over at ClickZ.) It's about optimization. At the moment, it's about website optimization. But that's changing.

Some companies see the Internet as their main way to communicate with their customers. They are looking at these numbers as a means to optimize all of their marketing. And then all of their customer communications. And then their business as a whole.

What do our customers want? What interests them? What shall we build for them? Where do they want it? These are the sort of questions that web analytics can deliver.

If you stop thinking about it in terms of pages and clicks, and start thinking about it in terms of revealing human behavior, then web analytics is an interesting and vital datastream into all of your customer analytics and business intelligence.

Seth Romanow headed up the most impressive web analytics team I had ever met. Compaq Computer tracked every visitor click, from banner ad to click-through to landing page and through navigation path to laptop purchase. In 2001, I profiled Romanow and his team as the best example I could find for my book, Web Metrics (Wiley, 2002).

When Compaq was purchased, Romanow's group was put in charge of web analytics for all of HP. Convinced that he is destined to lead the way wherever he goes, I wanted to keep track of Romanow. I found it much easier when he became one of the founders of the Web Analytics Association—and a fellow director on the board.

Today, he is responsible for customer intelligence analytics in Microsoft's Server and Tools Division. He is in charge of creating the online data collection and analysis platforms and delivering customer insight services to Microsoft.com stakeholders. I caught up with him for an update on what he—and Microsoft—are up to regarding customer experience.

Web analytics is growing up. Omniture - one of the 800 pound gorillas of the web analytics industry, has added certification to its offerings at the Omniture University.

An Omniture Certified Professional comes in three flavors according to the Omniture Certified Professional Program

The Web Analytics Association is also working on certification programs for Web analytics professionals. While the WAA is going to ensure proper strategic and business acumen, Omniture is going to certify their users for technical skills. Watch for WAA announcements by the end of the year.

By tradition, the first post is intended to set the tone and the proper level of expectation. Fair enough.

You'll find that I am the defender of the customer when it comes to online experience.

Yes, I know how hard it is to create and maintain a website - I have several of my own. But the customer MUST come first, or what's the point of even having a site?

So this blog is going to focus on how online customer experience can be measured and optimized. I'll be back...

Take a good look in the mirror. What you see is not your customer base. Your customers don't live where you live, eat what you eat or feel what you feel. They don't know what you know. Now take a look at your marketing department. Nope, your customers are not there, either. The CEO's office? That's the very last place they'll be found.

If you think you're doing your customers and prospects a favor by building your web site to work the way you think best, think again. If your design decisions are made in passing by senior executives ("How about a Tell My Friends' Friends button?"), then the problem goes much deeper than can be managed here.

Customers come in all shapes and sizes, and not one of them wants your product or service. Really. They don't want it. What they want is what it will do for them, and each of them has a different opinion about what that is. Those different customers with their different reasons for buying will buy in different ways. So how do you make a unique, online experience that caters to them all?

Step 1: Listen. The Voice of Customer (VoC) is your best friend. You can learn more in a handful of five-minute phone calls with customers than you can with a stack of surveys.