Web Analytics

2

Data Collection—Importance and Options

GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) was one of the very early acronyms coined in the PC era. The quality of the output was directly related to the quality of the input. Computers have gotten much smarter since the early days and sometimes they can do something smart with garbage going in so that something better than garbage comes out—often something useful.

 

But from the perspective of web analytics, we still live very much in the world of GIGO. This is because our field is quite young, our data capture mechanisms are still in a state of flux as they try to keep pace with the changing nature the Web itself, and all the time we have new customer experiences coming online, which forces us to.

In this chapter, ...