Complete Web Monitoring

Tying Together Offsite and Onsite Data

One of the most difficult types of data integration involves linking what happens elsewhere in the world to your web analytics data. Whether it’s a poster on a bus that contains your URL, a mention on a social network, or a call to your sales department that began on your website, it’s hard to monitor the long funnel.

There are two main ways of tying offsite activity back to your website. The first is to gather information from social network sites where visitors opt in and share their identities. The second is to mark your offsite messages with custom URIs that you can track with your analytics tool.

Visitor Self-Identification

The first approach, which is the basis for systems like Open Social, Beacon, OpenID, myBlogLog, and Disqus, requires that you enroll yourself in the social network somehow. Then visitors who want to share their identity with you can do so.

This is the simplest way to track users. You may even be able to analyze inbound links from certain social networks to see who’s sending traffic. For example, referrals from www.twitter.com/acroll indicate that the visit came from the profile page of Twitter user “acroll.” In practice, traffic of this kind is only a fraction of Twitter traffic, as most people view links in their own Twitter feeds and with third-party desktop clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl.

Many social networks want to monetize the analysis of their traffic; indeed, “selling analytics” is the new “ad-driven” business ...