as you know I’m rather new to the field (having spent most of my time learning about the web (mostly SEO), marketing and statistics in general). But I have to say I find this pretty interesting:

“Perhaps what you called web analytics before was in reality reporting or marketing performance optimization. Iterative Analysis and true online business optimization is way more sophisticated than web reporting. Deriving value out of segmentation and combination of trends and behavioral attributes is another league than looking at KPIs.”

I’m really into analyzing data, but unfortunately what I’ve seen and read about web analytics so far has been mostly the very basics..more like definitions of the basic metrics, what tool to choose whether java script or log files are the better option, etc.

I’ve also read some stuff about multivariate testing and the way Avinash suggested to apply statistical control limits and statistical significance to web data, but unfortunately I haven’t really seen any examples of web analytics, that really got down to the number crunching/hardcore analytics part .

I know analyzing data shouldnt be an end in itself and theres obviously no use using complicated data analysis techniques if it doesn’t help improve business goals…and I kind of started doubting if web analytics was really that much about actual analytics, but after that paragraph it seems to be that it pretty much is the way you describe it.

I was really a bit surprised that when reading a lot of posts in the yahoo group I never really came across any posts discussing analytics techniques but mostly web related stuff.

You don’t happen to know of any sources on the web where I could see some examples of the more sophisticated web analytics techniques?

I guess what you mean by segmentation is another type of segmentation than simply “segmenting” traffic by search traffic, direct traffic, etc..and segmenting search traffic by PPC and organic traffic..and then “segmenting” by keywords but rather the type of complex segmentation applied in analytical CRM/database marketing campaigns? sort of the way Amazon uses data mining (or what one would like to call it) to gain a competitive advantage by suggesting appealing products to the client based on browsing history etc.?