Content Management Matters ™

Even since the Web descended down from the heavens (through a series of pipes and tubes, of course), we web folks have been obsessed with gathering, analyzing and spouting our wisdoms about metrics. By far the most popular metric these days is the length of time spent looking, reading or otherwise examining the screen in front of us.

It is to be accepted and otherwise unquestioned that the longer the time a user spends on a page, the better. So you can imagine the relief of online newspaper publishers when they learned of the results from data collected by Nielsen Online in March 2008.

Are you curious about the exact click behavior of your website visitors? Yes, well, you are surely not alone.

Going beyond server log files and the latest Google Analytics facelift, a new SaaS application has sprung up, delivering a very visual representation of the paths your users travel and the clicks they take along the way.

The main U.S. newspaper auditing group, Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), has announced that it will now include newspapers' print, online and combined readership figures in its biannual reports, citing that "the numbers are a key factor in negotiations on newspaper advertising rates between newspapers and marketers."

In one of their stellar new reports analyst firm CMS Watch recently reviewed Google Analytics, a free offering that shares the Google characteristics of a simple, effective UI and quick adoption by earnest early adopters.

What's the verdict? While pretty, it's insufficient to meet enterprise analytics needs.