Who, what, why important to know about Web visitors

Perhaps you have tried sharpening your thinking about your site by collecting data about visitors. The usual approach is to collect a lot of site data, letting it pile up, with the idea that someday you will dig through it to find the nuggets of business insight buried inside.

The problem with this approach is that without an advance plan to direct the analysis, the nuggets of insight are not usually worth the time and effort spent in the digging. The reason is that the data from Web site log files is diffuse.

The valuable stuff is distributed more like…