Conversion Funnel

Conversion Funnel is a very important term used in web analytics and is widely used to measure the efficency of the site.

Wiki defines this as
"
Conversion funnel is a technical term used in e-commerce operations to describe the track a consumer takes through an Internet advertising or search system, navigating an e-commerce web site and finally converting to a sale."

Lot of web analystics use this for quantifying the website performance and calculate the conversion rate.

Behavioral Targeting and Behavioral Tracking

Behavioral Targeting and Behavioral Tracking is another trend which is gaining prominance among web marketers. This concept helps in targeting ads on the users needs which results in better conversions.

This article in bnet gives a very good overview of this trend , its evil effects and
why it is gaining prominance in web marketing.
http://www.bnet.com/article/what-is-behavioral-targeting/199800

Some of the key players in behavirol targeting are

Yahoo/BlueLithium
Revenue Science
NebuAd
Tacoda
Doubleclick

Tools For Web Page Optimization

http://www.webuildpages.com/seo-tools/spider-test/index.php
http://www.webuildpages.com/seo-tools/header-checker/
http://www.webuildpages.com/search/
http://www.seomoz.org/dp/the-internet-marketing-handbook

Current Market Trend towards Analytics Solution

Initially when analytics was introduced in the mid 90’s the software products which uses the log analysis was popular.

But by the early 2000’s the debate about data collection methods cooled off; the two major methods began to coexist, with page tagging becoming more popular. In addition, the ASP solution was suddenly attractive from a financial point-of-view. Companies could do “pay as you go”, thereby avoiding large hardware and software implementation investments turning up on the balance sheet. Also, ASP solutions became more flexible, offering custom reporting and the ability to send their online data to corporations.

By late 2000’s ASP providers like Google analytics and Omniture has become the market leaders.

Web Analytics Solution Providers

The above implementation techniques led to two different types of solutions providers.

1. Software Products providers who has developed software products for reading the web server log files and provide reporting based on it.
2. ASP based solution providers who use the data collected from javascript code snippets on the web pages and run data mining tools to retrieve appropriate analysis reports.

Page Tagging

In this approach every page is tagged with a javascript which will notify a third-party server when a page is rendered by a web browser. Often the tags are a single snippet of code referencing a javascript. This type of technique is known as client-side data collection.
Page tagging can be performed in-house, but it is more often provided as a third-party service.Page tagging most often involves a monthly fee, although some vendors offer installable page tagging solutions with no additional page view costs.

Logfile Analysis

In this approach a server log or a log file is automatically created and maintained by the servers. For example the visitor information , IP address , referrer etc is stored in the log files and a statistical analysis of the server log can help in understanding the traffic patterns by time of day, day of week, referrer etc. Web site optimization, fine tuning of sales effort can be achieved by effective analysis of these log files.
Historically this was popular as server logs was readily available and so the site owners just had to buy a software which reads the log files and analyze them and generates report out of it.