How about a World Wide Web simulator? Just submit your Web site design and implementation plans to this rule-based, artificially intelligent, neural-networked interpretation of 513,410,000 surfing people; it thinks about it for a while, and out comes a 3-year analysis. Will your site get lots of traffic or be a ghost town? Generate sales or cause very unpleasant PR? All the anguish and nail-biting done away with. Everything fully automatic, with no risk of public humiliation. Why do we want such a tool? Because we're clueless. Our Web sites were created in a volcanic eruption of bombastic enthusiasm and visionary expectation in an era when all things were possible and we just made it up as we went along. Was it worth it? Of course. Are we grateful for the Era of Experimentation and Learning? Absolutely. How do we take our sites to the next level? Will the changes we propose have a positive or negative impact? There are several popular methods for answering those questions: Wait and see Trial and error Give it a shot Presumption, supposition, hypothesis Wild conjecture Reading tea leaves But my 11-year-old son likes it The Magic 8-Ball We're clueless.               Get a copy right now at Amazon.com What Kind of a Book Is This? Good question. Let's start with what this book is not. This Book Is Not About Statistical Analysis Granted, you're going to need some statistical analysis smarts before you tackle half of this stuff, but you're not going to get pummeled with it here. There are plenty of places to learn the fine and mystical arts of higher mathematics and how they apply to the Web. This is not one of them. This Book Is Not About Technology I've written a slew of books about the Internet and I do my best to steer clear of which products are the most robust and which platforms offer the most features. That's a moving target, and this is a printed book, after all. While I will cover the basics in layman's terms, I will not be investigating the intricate inner workings of various servers, applications, databases, or networking software any more than necessary. This Book Is Not About the Size of the Web There are plenty of companies like Nua.com stretching the limits of their ability to keep track of how many people are online at this very moment. There are many ways to measure what people find interesting on the Web, such as the Buzz Index from Yahoo. If you're looking for your next advertising promotion to cater to the statistical Yahoo user, then the Buzz Report is the right place. This book is not. This Book Is Not About Accounting There are many prestigious halls of academe that would be delighted to enthrall you with the rigors and rewards of standard accepted accounting practices. Sadly, they have a little trouble when you start asking about page dwell time per order by visitor with a recency factor greater than once a week. This Book Is Not About Internal Operations or Procurement The Internet can save astonishing amounts of money by being a tool for internal communications, communications with suppliers, and generally running a company. Descriptions of the best ways to measure your intranet for maximum effectiveness or your acquisition systems for best value are not to be found in these pages. Okay, so what is this book about? Another good question. Keep this up and we'll get along just fine. This Book Is About Measuring Your Success with Customers This book looks at the Web as a business tool for communicating with your customers. I have been in sales and marketing for 20 years and have been a marketing and customer service consultant for the past nine of them. Therefore, this book is about measuring those places where the customer and the company come together: Advertising: Raise awareness Marketing: Educate and persuade Sales: Complete the transaction Customer Service: Answer questions and solve problems. This is a business book for business people. This book takes a commonsense approach to what can be measured and business perspective about what should be measured.

I wanted to say "bravo!" I read much of it in a couple of days and found it to be superb -- clear, to the point, funny and informative. A really excellent, useful book. I found myself saying "Oh, yes" or "yup, yup" many times.     Jill Ellsworth - Oak Ridge Research