My journey into Web Analytics began with my first web page that I launched in 1996. At the time I was still learning HTML, CSS did not yet exist, and the norm for web metrics was a “hit counter.” I immediately fell in love with that little hit counter – I loved knowing how many visits my silly web page was getting. For a long time that was the only metric I was able to track. In late 1997 I was hired as a webmaster at a high-tech company and was introduced to WebTrends. While I could not use it on any of my personal sites, I definitely had fun looking at all the different metrics it measured for our company sites. Beyond just visits there were page views and referrers and so many other metrics that truly began to give me an insight into who was visiting these sites.
From 1997 to 2001 I was also attending graduate school, and had my focus on web usability. Like many people, I was easily frustrated with how unusable some websites were becoming. Everyone wanted to newest, “coolest” gimmick on their site, regardless of how it impacted their visitors. I became very passionate about web usability and that was a big focus of my master’s program. During that time my role at that high-tech company kept evolving and while I still enjoyed looking at metrics, the tedious slowness of the existing tools kept me from being able to do much with the data. Our sites were changing too frequently to gain much insight in the monthly reports we were running, which would easily take 3-4 days to compile.
Then at the end of 2004 we began evaluating some new web metrics tools and narrowed it down to two – HitBox or SiteCatalyst. Ultimately we went with SiteCatalyst from Omniture and to this day I’m glad we made that choice, as they have become a leader in this industry. Finally I had access to a tool that loaded reports much faster, and did not require data to be compiled for several days. Even better, the data was available in near real-time, which was amazing to me at the time. That is when my flirtations with web analytics became a full-fledged love-affair.
When I was laid off in 2008, I knew immediately which part of my former job I wanted to focus my career on, going forward – web analytics. So on November 11, 2008, I officially formed Endress|Analytics, LLC. Since then I have never looked back or regretted going independent. It has been one heck of a journey so far and I look forward to what further adventures my future holds.
Endress|Analytics, LLC is a sole proprietorship owned and operated by Gabriele Endress, and is based in Northern Colorado. Gabriele is a member of the Web Analytics Association.
