"Web metrics should absolutely be the concern of the CIO even if it'shoused in another part of the organization," says Gary Massel, vicepresident and CIO at Boise Office Solutions in Itasca, Ill. "If you'reconcerned about your customer, then you have to be concerned aboutyour website's performance."

The following are descriptions of some of the most important metricsand analysis tools, depending on the type of website.

Business-to-Consumer/Retail Sites

Website metrics and analytics are especially important to companiesthat are selling goods on their website. First, retail sites should belooking at conversion rate and average order value in order to gaugesuccess levels. In addition, they should tie revenue-based metricswith customer behavior. For example, companies can use techniques suchas funnel-based analysis, in which they compare drop-off rates withlost revenue, says Matthew Berk, senior analyst at Jupiter Research inDarien, Conn. "Page views and visitors used to be key," says CharlesHachtman, CTO at Los Angeles-based Novica.com, a site that sellshandmade items from around the world. "Now it's back to basics. Everye-tailer has to have a Web analytics tool--otherwise they have noinformation about how their site is performing."

Here are a select group of metrics and tools that retail sites can useto help measure success.