WAA's official definition: "Web Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage."
Wikipedia says it differently: "Web analytics is the study of the behaviour of website visitors."We have plenty to do and learn with the web analytics itself. According to Forrester Research 46 % says that taking action from the data is the top challenge in web analytics. Let's take one example: our company's conversion rate (contact requests) was 0,42 % in October. Is it good or bad? Well, it depends. In September the figure was 0,59 % and in August it was 0,62 %, so the big question is: what should we do about it? And do we need more customer leads at the moment? That's something what we have to look from our project management system - or recall the company's strategy.
We could get more visitors by activating a Google's ad campaign or by sending an attractive newsletter. As I said earlier, we'll promote Google Analytics for those customers which don't have any web analytics system in place. So, we have to form different kind of groups into E-mailer module which is a part of our CMS. Those companies (actually people) which are using Index Tools system, those companies which are already using Analytics and those who are using nothing. We have to collect data from the source code of customer sites (to find the possible tracking code) and compare it to our customer and e-mail lists.
After forming different kind of groups, based on their earlier customer (or visitor) behavior, we can send more customized newsletters to these people and get them convert more likely. Of course, we have to measure and learn how these recipients react on our message. And that, my friend, is web analytics and also simple business intelligence case. Some day in the future, we will have a solution where all these brilliant systems (CRM, web analytics, CMS, financial and project management) are integrated and the really usefull business information is in one place.