Having freshly started with my current employer, I was given a blunt mission, in other words a throw in the deep-end! I had to find out what users were actually doing on our flagship product, that was back in 2006 and it sounded rather simple.  At the time the said product was running on Oracle Portal.  Believe it or not, no web analytics attached to the framework - mind you, in 2010 Microsoft Sharepoint is exactly the same.  So we looked at different options and eventually went for Hitbox from WebSideStory, we implemented it during 2007. This is when my interest and my knowledge for all things Web Analytics really increased, it even accelerated later this year, just like my post rate on this blog!

The turn of the millenium coincided with the advent of content management systems, on a large scale.  It felt like a digital gold rush, there was a plethora of them, the market has now consolidated but its impact on web analytics has remained.  Data-driven web sites rely on templates and that meant that static code could not be used anymore.  Even using the tracking code on top pages would not help, URL ended-up with a series of tokens and unique identifiers in place of clear page names entered by the developers. Often these developers were running Analytics, it was my case and then I thought, it did not made any sense.  Some advanced CMS had reporting tools built-in but for most of them it was not a critical activity.  I then left the business of working with content management systems anyway so would have lost track.  I carried on using hosted services on my static websites for a while but then I stopped building these altogether.  Web analytics in its static form ended-up there for me.