Your concern about tracking codes impacting performance on your website is warranted. However, if you are going to do ecommerce correctly, one of the best investments you can make is to invest in an outside-the-firewall performance monitoring service like Gomez (www.gomez.com) or Keynote (www.keynote.com). Simulating a user browsing your site, these types of services show you performance bottlenecks. Specifically, you will be able to see requests made to the servers where you are sending all that tracking data. And if those requests don't meet your SLA's, you can dump them.

This service has saved me many a time and allowed me to objectively and truthfully communicate the condition of my website to my management. It answers the questions "How is the Website Doing" and "How Does Our Website Performance Stack Up" against everyone else.

'sodo

For a new comer like me, i say for difficult questions, simple answers. For these simple answers it means lot of expertise and a lot of work.

p.s: sorry for my English

BTW by my last line i was implying that if we start tracking everything it will decrease the responsiveness of the website since it has to do various analytic related activities in the background. Apologies for not making that clear.

If you want to measure success the last reason for you not being able to do so should be missing data.

Given data storage is cheap and compute power not quite cheap but easily available, my belief is that you should put some thought into collecting all the data you'll need. Take a step back and try to think of what you are trying to do in your web business, then capture all you need.

The examples I mention at the start of this comment for example are all deal breakers if you don't have 'em.

An example of something not every one needs is the ability to track mouse movements of each visitor on your site. Some people might need it, most people will find terabytes of data and work, but the benefits might not quite be as one might expect. In those cases I could skip those parts of data capture.

I am sorry I don't understand the last line in your comment ("IMHO if we begin capturing of all data it will deny the end-user of the Rich Internet Experience that is so much talked about these days.") Data capture is a passive activity and should not "deny" the users of rich experiences on your websites.

Rajiiv : Web Analytics has lots of data that you can use as key input as it comes to defining a robust Information Architecture for your website. More than that if you do think of a few different Information Architectures for your website then Web Analytics can help you test them for optimal fit with customer expectations and help you make a much better choice (vs. you plunking the latest great thought on unsuspecting customers!).

Amir : I have not had the opprotunity to try clickfox but you'll admit that this problem you mention in your comment:

that you still have to do all the work to extract value from it.

This will never go away! No matter what tool, what technology.

On a serious note, I think your point was that things will get easier with your technology but companies will still have to do the work required to extract value, only perhaps a bit less.

Juan : Done! Thanks.

-Avinash.

One question i would like to ask is that in your interview with Michael Julson you mentioned that

"a core part of every process to ensure data is being captured and analyzed"

My question would be what would be the end limit(threshold) of capturing and analyzing everything?? If we being tagging everything and trying to capture every simple event wont it just be an unnecessary overhead when a normal visitor visits the page. IMHO if we begin capturing of all data it will deny the end-user of the Rich Internet Experience that is so much talked about these days.