I recently wrote about performing additional calculations on Google Analytics data in order to derive more precise information. One of the problems most of us have is being forced to use the metrics and reports designed for us by the web analytics vendors. In most cases this is fine because what they give us is, generally speaking, useful. However, there are many occasions when this is problematic.
Firstly, a metric can be useful in some cases and misleading in others. Angie Brown, a member of the WAA standards committee, has an excellent blog showing problems with the bounce rate in this regard.
A more systemic problem is that some of the things we have wanted to measure could not be measured with web technology as it was in the 1990s, and we designed web metrics around these limitations. Technology has moved on, but metrics haven't.
In most cases, we were dealing with limits in browser technology. Anyone who tried to do web development over the last 15 years will have been driven crazy by browser compatibility issues. I am not aware of any browser that implements the standards for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript perfectly, even today. They all fail in some way, and they all fail differently. Often a work-around for one browser will make things worse for another. The net result is that much of what is theoretically possible in web design is simply too labor-intensive (and expensive) to design for. In this respect Google's browser systems are state-of-the-art and show what can be done, but the rest of us don't have the time or budget their developers do.
The programming language browsers run is called JavaScript, which is not implemented the same way on all browsers, even today. JavaScript issues are the reason that few analytics systems directly measure the time spent on a page. Instead, they infer it from the time of request for the next page. Most web analytics systems use JavaScript to gather their data. A script runs inside the browser and sends data back to the server. Closing the web page stops that script. It is theoretically possible to get the JavaScript to send information as the page is closed using an unLoad() function. However, the performance of the unLoad() function was (and still is) an area of huge variation. It may even work (or not work) differently depending on how the page is closed.
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