Robert Hoekman Jr is dispelling some common myths in the world of web analytics. The first part of the article regarding hits vs page view vs visitors will likely be old news to most readers of this blog and RIA developers in general. This is still very valuable for most folks out there and worth the read. I've had my fair share one hour plus phone calls explaining to marketing folks what all the various analytics they have mean. Towards the end of the article Robert makes a great point that page views for RIAs have become almost irrelevant.

If your site is a web application, the number of page views might be completely irrelevant because 50% of the actions on the site are performed on a single screen. In that case, information on individual files and data requests and click patterns will be more meaningful.

This a topic I hope to explore in more detail and pull best practices in analyzing usage of RIAs and how to instrument them. Not "how" but also the "what" and they "why". There are so many things to consider: how long the application is in certain state, witch features are interacted with how, what keyboard shortcuts are used, what elements are clicked on, or hovered over, etc... What analytics do you look at? How do you look at them? Are you using the event tracking feature in Google Analytics? Omniture? A cinelytics tool? Let's start the discussion.

Read more from Andre Charland.