Selecting a Web Analytics tool is never an easy decision. There is no standard, scientific way to do so -- it's a bit of an art. The decision is full of compromises -- no one tool or fancy family of tools from one brand will be able to do everything you think or want them to be able to do. Nor will any one tool have all the bells and whistles you want.

Attribution has always been an issue for ROI-based Internet campaigns. Historically, ad servers have been programmed to credit attribution for a sale, download or other action to the last click from the IP address. But things are changing.

One of the most valuable lessons I have learnt from my previous career in database marketing is "never leave a marketing-related data decision in the hands of an IT person."

Advertising, it turns out, is a lot like physics; they're both all about time and space. Newspaper, magazine, billboard, and place-based advertisers buy space; TV and radio advertisers buy time. The online business originally aligned around a spatial construct (banner ads defined by area with two dimensions, and existing on a page); but increasingly, online advertisers are migrating toward a temporal construct, especially with the advent of online video.

Tthere seems to be a tacit agreement in the industry on clickthrough conversions. The conventional wisdom is that as long as a conversion happens after a click, that conversion should be credited back to ad exposure. A pertinent but almost never asked question is whether such glorious treatment of clickthrough conversion is really justified.

Over the last two weeks, my fellow Metrics Insider columnists have correctly pointed out that online metrics are neither standardized nor easily integrated across systems. Vocabulary is muddled. Numbers do not match. Data exists in silos and is isolated from related data. Systems do not adequately or easily talk to each other. Research services, ad servers, and Web analytics tools report similarly named, overlapping and often conflicting metrics. Unfortunately, these problems will not disappear anytime soon, even with emerging "standards" and continued attention paid by the industry to these important issues.

Last week, Josh Chasin wrote about the state of online media metrics with considerable vexation. I share his frustration.

The Internet, we have been told for a decade, is the most measurable medium. Hence it is not without vexation that the Internet business community observes the current state of online metrics. Because unlike a traditional medium such as network TV, where a single metric system has held uncontested sway for over 50 years, the Internet community is "blessed" with an embarrassment of measurement riches....

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics," is a popular phrase attributed to Benjamin Disraeli by Mark Twain. My degree is in history, a subject I've had a passion for all my life. This remark by this most colorful of Victorian British prime ministers highlights an essential aspect of history -- those that drive the agenda control the agenda. Thus history is, for the majority, whatever those capable of doing so want it to be.

First, and perhaps most painfully, I'd like to confess that I've been covering media and marketing research for nearly 30 years. And no, I didn't begin covering it in grade school. Secondly, I have to admit that even after all that time, I really don't know much about research. But why am I telling you this? More importantly, why should you care?