The bloom is off the rose when it comes to the Internet, and knowing what works and what doesn't is a necessity. We're no longer looking at hits as a viable indicator of our Web marketing prowess. Pageviews have given us the most consistent, yet deeply unsatisfying, look at our success.

With so many options, there has to be a way to focus on what provides you with the best return on your investment. Unfortunately, there are as many ways to measure things as there are things to be measured, multiplied by the business goals of those doing the measuring.

In May 2000, Matt Cutler of NetGenesis ( www.netgen.com ) and I published a white paper called " E-Metrics, Business Metrics for the New Economy ". We interviewed 20 leading Web managers from sites you'd recognize including, Barnes & Noble, BBC Online, Charles Schwab, iVilliage.com, Microsoft - you get the picture - in order to find out what they were measuring and how they were measuring and what they were doing with the results they got.

When we took the E-Metrics white paper on the road and performed an around-the-world series of seminars, we started out with the same questions you'll have to ask yourself when you want to start recording a baseline against which to test your progress: What are you trying to accomplish? What challenges do you face? What are you trying to learn? Why do you need to know? How will that help you in your business? What are your most important business goals at the moment?

The answers we got were many and varied. Take a quick look at these, and see if you can spot a few that are worth a tick-mark for your organization:

Increase repeat visits
Understand user behavior
Identify E-Metrics focused on VC/investor interest
Integrated view of customers
Identify key metrics appropriate to business
How do we establish a baseline to work from?
How much impact is traditional marketing having on the site?
ROI - where to spend on promotion and infrastructure
How to continuously learn from ongoing data
How can an offline business measure effectiveness on the Web/branding?
How do we optimize banner rotation?
Compare E-Metrics with industry/competition
Measure the value of personalization for e-mail marketing
Do we have effective customer segmentation?
How do we define unique users and move to personalization?
How do we identify real people versus unique users?
How do we get to details about users?
How do we understand shopping cart abandonment?
How do we measure traffic flow?
Understand how customers navigate to deliver the best user experience
Conduct clickstream analysis
Understand content freshness
Understand where customers are coming from
Understand reach
Metrics for customer intelligence relevant to our business model
Understand loyalty of users
Define patterns for loyal customers, understand lifetime value
Identify action for insight gained about users' behavior
Understand and optimize acquisition of customers
Understand how to track conversions
Measure customer satisfaction
Predict future purchases
Get buy-in and have senior management understand the importance of E-Metrics
Identify measurement standards
Process for establishing objectives for measurement
Get everyone on the same page, fix communication breakdown
Cost justify investment for measurement software/services
Get agreement on what to measure between staff and upper management
Process for developing custom reports for individual users within organization
Integrate multichannel offline data
Correlate e-mail data to Web-derived data
Using consistent methods for measurement across business
Data accuracy - getting consistent, accurate numbers
Identify correct tools and methods for measurement effort
Track Flash and media content applications
Track data collected from mobile-commerce
Get real-/near-real- time data
Understand sampling as an option
How do we deal with privacy/security?

If you're feeling a little woozy right now, it's OK. Most people get a little lightheaded at these altitudes - it's perfectly normal. Just sit down, put your head between your knees, and breathe into this paper bag. Good. The room will stop spinning in just a moment.

The best approach is to take this a step at a time:

Somebody comes to your Web site.
Your Web site responds.
The visitor wanders your site looking for things.
The visitor leaves or buys something and then leaves.
The visitor leaves footprints all over the place for your analysis.
The visitor comes back or not.
You try to determine if the visitor thinks you're doing a good job.
You try to determine if the public/industry thinks you're doing a good job.
You try to determine the visitor's lifetime value to the company.

It'll take some doing.
Where do you start?

Here's where I prove that I'm a consultant... It depends.