Untangling the Web: taking your online presence from the cellar to stellar.

• Author: Stevenson, Brooks

WHEN THE INTERNET WAS FIRST CREATED, how to use the information provided wasn't nearly as important as how much information you could cram onto your site. Web sites--especially e-commerce sites--were popping up at an alarming pace. And there seemed to be an inexplicable trend of investing millions of venture capital dollars into an unproven method for making money.

The abundance of Web sites coupled with the rise and fall of Internet stocks in the late 1990s proved there's more to mastering the World Wide Web than slick design, cheap products and a glut of content. Now, with the Computer Industry Almanac estimating that more than one billion people will be using the Internet by the end of 2005, there's a greater need to capture, analyze and implement Web user data to improve business.

Web analytics, a relatively new industry, is bridging the gap between what Internet users want and how various businesses are meeting consumers' needs. The various Web analytics software products are designed to look at visitors' online behavior, allowing businesses to optimize their Web site structure and content to better serve customers. In general, Web analytics help deduce the way visitors relate to a particular site.

"It's fundamentally about making smarter, more informed decisions about your online business," says Matt Belkin, vice president of best practices at Omniture, an Orem-based Web analytics company. "Understanding your business' place in the system and understanding how to improve is critical."

When it comes to e-commerce, there are three key areas where user data is crucial: acquisition of customers, conversion of customers and retention of customers. Based on data from Web analytics, companies can pinpoint products to feature on their homepage or features that need to be more prominently placed on high-traffic pages.

Discovery Store, an e-commerce division of cable giant Discovery Channel Communications and a client of Omniture's, wanted to see where traffic was coming from and where it ended up on the site. They found that the pages for the cable channel TV show "Trading Spaces" was generating massive amounts of traffic, so they made it more accessible from the home page. The new placement ended up increasing revenue by 35 percent and drove overall site traffic up 35 percent.

"When we can identify user behavior, we can create return customers, improve the user experience, and generally increase revenue," says Belkin. "Decisions about Web...