Sometimes I sit back in awe of all the progress internet marketers have made. Thanks to the efforts of hundreds of thousands of really smart and productive people and businesses, we now have website design tools like personas, measurement systems like Omniture and Google Analytics, savvy agencies eager to redesign the next website, and analysts like Forrester Research to help us along the way. Free tools abound, and website traffic data are cheap and easy to collect. But sometimes we fall prey to our own success. Website data and analytics are a great example of where commoditization can lead us astray.

You can capture metrics on almost everything a website visitor does and load it into a spreadsheet (if you're fond of calculation) or a powerful analytical tool like SAS or SPSS (if you're fond of findings and have a budget). Regardless of your approach, you can embark on plenty of analytical exercises that gobble-up time, attention and money. However, trying to answer the age-old question -- "Where's my ROI?" -- can have a sobering effect on those of us who become intoxicated with the elixir of generic visitor reports and the exhilaration of owning mounds of raw traffic data. This is especially true when the value metrics for a business, like revenue or lead volume and quality, are not immediate and obvious.

The first part of this article covers basic principles for measuring ROI with website data. The second part provides a set of typical strategic digital marketing objectives and recommendations for how to measure performance, along with some examples.