Customer satisfaction: Clickstream analysis can gather importantinformation about how users navigate a website, but it can't explainhow a person feels while they are doing it. Enter the online customersurvey. FirstGov.gov, a government information portal managed by theGeneral Services Administration, gets reports on customer satisfactionfrom ForeSee Results, which quantifies customer satisfaction throughonline surveys using the American Customer Satisfaction Index. "Themost important metric to us is the measurement of whether a user has apositive experience on our site and whether they will recommendFirstGov to another user," says Michael S. Messinger, director ofmarketing and communications for the site.

B2B Sites

When a businessperson goes to a website to buy supplies, she isusually going there to make a purchase and leave, rather than browse.Therefore, business-to-business websites need to worry most abouttheir site's performance and how easily and efficiently customers canget on and buy what they need. After all, most businesses are usingB2B sites to cut costs from their supply chain. "In B2B, there is acontractual relationship, so users can't just go to another site,"says Boise Office Solutions' Massel. "Therefore, if they go into yoursite and have problems, it's terribly frustrating for them."

Site performance: While all websites worry about how fast and easytheir site is to use, businesses are perhaps the most demanding andimpatient users of all. "We get a lot of feedback when things aren'tgoing well on our site," says Chris D'Agostino, e-commerce developmentmanager for Boise Office Solutions. D'Agostino says that rawperformance numbers are the most important metric for his site, whichsells office supplies to businesses. Boise Office Solutions uses aservice from Keynote Systems to evaluate its site performance. Usingautomated agents around the country, Keynote runs transactions typicalto a site and collects data on such metrics as how long it takes toplace an order. Boise Office Solutions can then access the data viabrowser.

User efficiency: At Englewood, Colo.-based IHS Engineering, whichprovides engineering information and resources to Fortune 1000companies through subscription and custom data, a full-time Webanalyst scours the log server files for user patterns and trends. "Forexample, if we see that a set of users on the system are searching forsomething too often, that might cause us to go in and take a look atwhy they are having trouble," says Paul Magin, vice president ofproduct development for IHS Engineering. Magin calls that approach"user efficiency analysis." "If they are having to conduct threesearches to get one answer, we've done something wrong," hesays.