I often present local search marketing seminars with my friend Matt Bailey of Site Logic Marketing. One of his best sessions is on web analytics and he's finally taken one of his best slides and turned it into a full length article. So what's the fuss all about? Well...Matt calls it "Analytics According to Captain Kirk." (Yes, he's a bit of a nerd...but stick with me, this stuff is good.)

I'll let Matt's words plant the seed of interest that will make you want to read the whole post...

Basically, Matt goes into some great detail analyzing the crew member deaths in the 80 episodes of the original Star Trek to find out if the red shirt crew members really DID die more often than anyone else. (I'm not going to tell you, you'll have to go find out for yourself.)

He then makes the great point that the death rates are no different than simple stats...what businesses need to do is focus on analysis, not just reporting. So he further breaks things down into what the top causes were for crew member deaths, how often people died in groups, and where they died. He relates this to the different ways that customers interact with your web site and how you can locate the conversion triggers to further improve your site's performance.