I think I mentioned something about this last month. Sure enough, here it is.

Analytics have never been easy to nail down. Even though most internet marketers have a love affair with them, they’re not always reliable or easy to comprehend for that matter. The data you really want many times seems just out of reach for even the best web stats packages. And as technology changes, so does the ability of today’s webstat packages to accurately track visitors on your site.

According to this piece from ClickZ, tabbed browsing, which is part of Firefox and will soon be a part of Microsoft’s IE7, has changed the way that users interact with websites and may, at some point, have an impact on the accuracy of your web analytics. Tabbed browsing may affect cookie tracking, path tracking, time on site (heck, sometimes I have pages open in tabs for days at a time), and others, all mentioned in the article.

Last month I linked to a clickstream study that believes that web services are largely responsible for changes in how users interact with the web, including the fact that 15% of all web navigation actions are now form submissions.

I would also be curious to learn how AJAX is affecting web analytics. In an AJAX application, the interaction with the user all takes place within one page view…

Web Analytics: The Results of Tabbed Browsing


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