By Kara Andrade
ONA Convention Online Staff

In the face of newspapers' lack of revenue growth and mounting pressure to generate more operating profit from online venues, Web analytics - the measurement of the behavior of visitors to a Web site - has become a panacea for print.

"Analytics gives us a history by which we might predict a future," said Andrew Edwards managing partner with Technology Leaders. "We get enamored by the notion that data will make us infallible, but at the end of the day you are taking the temperature of something and you're trying to predict whether it's going to rain tomorrow, but we can't predict the future entirely."

The tools, however, to measure online readership are more available now than they have been in the past. The move from measuring double-clicking and Web trends to figuring out site traffic and measuring RSS feeds and effective placement has evolved into a science that many newspapers are paying big bucks for.

Interactive media and commerce business giants like Redsheriff, Nielsen Media Research, Omniture, and Urchin have become the leading experts in site analysis. The problem for newspapers still remains in determining what online content is generating loyal readers and not "drive-bys" or readers who link by chance or during Web browsing.

The worry shared by newspapers is that commerce analytics measuring sites are only equipped to measure e-commerce and not content, but "a click is a click," said Edwards, "the tools that are out there are general and powerful enough to not be too difficult to adapt to a content model."

The key, for said Jay Small, director of online content at E.W. Scripps Newspapers, is that newspapers learn to adapt their print model and take more control in how information is presented or "unbundled" online. The fact that the Internet is not a local medium requires that newspapers become a "second filter" and take an active role in how national and local sections are presented online.

"The more we get a grip on gathering the data and learning to use it," said Small, "the more we realize we need know about the heads we don't have and the audience that's spending all of its time on a lot of new sites, but ours."

Privacy and accuracy issues also become a concern for tracking online users through cookies that are often erased or carry a user's personal information or identity.

"It's almost like you have a boat out at sea and you suddenly get hit by a torpedo, you don't know what's coming at you," Edwards said. "There's no way to know your audience at all times."

On the web:
Urchin
Technology Leaders
Ziff Davis
Marketing Sherpa