Back in the 1990’s a company called Web Trends released a tool that scanned website traffic logs and provided information on the number of visits, pageviews, and other rudimentary date about where site traffic originated. Instead of having to pour through reams and reams of mind-numbing data, companies could now easily see basic data about what was happening on their website.

Like Henry Ford and the Model-T did for the auto industry, Web Trends set the stage for the rest of the analytics market space well into the dot-com era. It introduced the lexicon of analytics to the commercial world, and did so quite successfully. Soon the language of analytics began making its way in to daily boardroom and water cooler discussions across the new digital landscape.

Though this language surrounding analytics did offer marketers and advertisers new ways of thinking about how their customers used websites it did not evolve as quickly as the websites themselves. Technologies like Javascript, Flash, Acrobat, and streaming video became more commonplace and websites as a communications and advertising platform became more sophisticated. But despite the maturation of the online world as a whole, the language of analytics simply did not keep pace. The online and interactive mediums kept evolving, but how organizations were talking about measurement did not.

After the bubble analytics took a back seat to pretty much everything. Not being armed with the latest version of analytics software was secondary to many companies as their current version was pleasantly providing all the data the company needed. Because of this the language of analytics within companies remained the same - how many visits, how many pageviews, and where did visitors come from.

The dot-com bust was a stopping point in the evolution of web analytics. Though the industry continued to improve and expand basic software functionaltiy, the rudimentary language of web analysis had become so cemented and solidified in the business community many organizations weren’t encouraged or expected to expand their own perception of analytics and look beyond visits. In the collective business community web analysis began to degrade from an evolutionary business tool into a set of programs that merely provided reporting, rather than inspiring new ways of thinking and revealing stories about how customers interacted with a website or other digital media.