Just read Gary Angel’s post on Web Analytics Tool Evaluation - it’s long but worth reading. I’ll summarize Gary’s article.
Web Analytic tools are really not built to track people, they’re more like "filters" that you can mix (more or less) to capture the approximate segment you want (IE: people that come to a page on your site from New York City last week - show me only those people and what they did).
But the tools don’t really track the full behavior - because they’re not really designed with that in mind - as Gary pointed out. You can do two things to compensate (and I’ve done both).
1. You can tag the URLs of any event you care about and then use the analytics tool to filter on the custom URLs with that tag (doable but a lot of work).
2. You an create a special Campaign tag and place it on the page you want to track during the time period you want to track - it’s similar to a Surfaid/Coremtrics Spot Tag, for example.
The second method works - well - but has to be set up deliberately - as does the first method.
That’s what Gary Angel’s post is about and the tools we have to work with today don’t really capture the full range of what people do.
Gary’s article is worth a read.
