So you want to buy a Saab. If you're looking to buy one in the UnitedStates, you might start your search at Saabusa.com. There, customerscan compare the latest models and find a dealer. Then they canactually go to the dealer showroom and buy a car. Or they could justmove to another site and forget about a shiny new Saab. In eithercase, the folks at Saabusa.com have no way of knowing whether they aremotivating online customers to visit a dealership.

So while the site's operators can track the number of hits and levelof traffic, they cannot analyze where or why a customer abandons thesite. "We need to move beyond hits and traffic and find out whatmotivates people to go to dealerships," says Richard Amling, thewebmaster for Saab Cars USA, based in Norcross, Ga. Amling notes thatSaab is in the process of shopping for a Web analytics softwarepackage so that it can analyze customer behavior.

During the dotcom heyday, companies slapped sites on the Web andwaited for traffic to pour in. They counted "eyeballs" and measuredtheir site's "stickiness" as a way to convey the online real estate'svalue to advertisers. When the Internet bubble burst, "stickyeyeballs" seemed suddenly worthless. Now, as the Web has moved frombeing a technology pipe to a sales channel, companies such as SaabCars USA need to update their Web measurement strategy with newmetrics and analysis tools that can help them analyze customerbehavior and improve their site's business success.

But while hits were once the metric du jour, the new metrics are notso clear-cut. "There is no standard metric that a company can rely onfor its website," says Randy Souza, an analyst at Cambridge,Mass.-based Forrester Research. "Metrics will be different fromcompany to company." Where a retail site might be focused onconversion rate (the number of online shoppers who actually buysomething), a business-to-business site might value site reliabilityand speed above all. In short, the most valuable metrics will dependon what you are trying to do with your site. Once that is determined,large enterprises should consider buying software to help analyze Webdata, while midsize and smaller companies should consider a hostedservice.

That's already happening and will likely increase in the next fewyears as companies come under increasing pressure to document theirwebsite's value. By 2006, Jupiter Research estimates, annual spendingon site analytics will reach $1 billion, by which time ASP-basedservices will account for 29 percent of spending. While IT leadersdon't always need to be directly involved, CIOs should be able tosuggest valuable metrics to marketing and operations departments.Measuring a website's success can also be crucial when CIOs are forcedto defend e-business spending. And IT leaders will need to partnerwith other business units on site redesigns that result from theanalysis of Web metrics.