‘In God we trust. All others must bring data.’
W. Edwards Deming, statistician
IDEA No 32
WEB ANALYTICS
The inventor of the department store, John Wanamaker, was the first person to buy advertising space in newspapers. He famously said, ‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is, I don’t know which half.’
That was before the Web was invented, the most measurable medium the world has ever known. The collection and reporting of website visitor data is called web analytics. The earliest online measurement tools, common across GeoCities in the mid-90s, were milometer-style hit counters. These days, web analytics is an industry in its own right.
At a basic level, you can measure the number of people who visit your site, and what ...
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