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.

First time I heard about WebTrends was through my IT department back in 2000, they were introducing what I believe was called WebTrends Firewall Suite.  This suite had nothing to do with Web Analytics which has become their core business.  It was all about monitoring and reporting on firewall activity basically making sure staff were not downloading too many MP3s - I was working at a radio station then so they were not that strict about it.

With the advent of server side scripting such as Active Server Pages (ASP) and then Parser Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), tracking all that comes with a hit was becoming possible.


I particularly remember working with the global.asa session variables in order to start tracking entry point, referrer URL, IP address, User Agent, search engines being used and most importantly keywords that led to your website - that was circa 1999.


At the time it was merely for development optimization purposes, IE 6 had not been released yet (way before 2002) and Netscape Navigator was still the browser for many corporations!  The W3C had already started battling against discrepancies in rendering the web but we wanted to make sure our web pages were not broken the top browsers.


One of the early insights I clearly remember was for a music site that was getting a lot of visits from Italy. It led to the localization of its forum which was also set for the Romance language.

Sawmill 6 to be more precise!  We were running our websites off Netscape Enterprise server – version 3.6 if I remember right.  So at the beginning of each month, we had an intern downloading access logs to crunch the files with Sawmill 6, that I remember! It was taking a fair amount of time, our websites were quite popular in the UK.  The reports were important then even if they were only used for their advertising value.  This was the only way to monetize the company’s web presence at the time.  I wish I had reports somewhere, I will ask the intern, am sure she does!

I started working on the internet back in 1997.  Working might be an overstatement, experimenting would be more appropriate.  Eventually though a homepage on the intranet of the high school were I was employed saw the light.  I think I built it with Microsoft FrontPage and it all came very naturally, so much so I decided to build web pages for a living.  A couple of years later and freshly certified with Adobe ACE on GoLive 4, I became a freelance web designer.  The internet was like the new frontier, the general public was a bit skeptical about it and businesses contended themselves with online brochures.  It’s funny when you think about it, traffic was mainly publicized through web counters.  Some of the more astute businesses were checking their log files already and this is how I got introduced to what is now called the science of Web Analytics.