currybetdotnet has a wonderful article entitled How Search Can Help You Understand Your Audience. A quote from the introduction:
It seems to me that many of the metrics with which we measure user interaction with the web are deeply flawed, and provide ample evidence that the internet was invented by physicists and technologists, not marketing and advertising executives. Page impression figures do not convey any information about whether the page view was satisfying or frustrating. Not all users accept cookies, and not all cookies can be associated with a single user when they are issued to computers across corporate networks or public internet access points. Tracking individual session data still doesn't tell us whether the user went to make a cup of tea or answer the door whilst they spent the measured 3 minutes on the page. Beyond that the effect of caching by ISPs can lead to users not even seeing the latest version of a page, let alone the problem it creates for capturing behavioural data.
Posted by Karl
May 7, 2003 09:19 AM