Now that the business of Internet marketing is beginning to meet those expectations, with analyst groups such as Piper Jaffrey predicting global online marketing spending of more than $55 billion by 2010, marketers' requirements for analytics tools have become expansive, and the capabilities of those tools have expanded to accommodate.

More than ever, analytics are recognized explicitly as a marketing tool, and developers are building their solutions more in line with that recognition. This week, Web analytics developer WebTrends (webtrends.com) announced that it had launched the WebTrends Marketing Lab product family, adding what it calls "marketing performance management" solutions to its analytics tools.

The Marketing Lab, says WebTrends, is intended to be a collection of software modules, some of which will roll out over the coming months. It currently includes two products: the latest version of the WebTrends Analytics software; and the brand new WebTrends Marketing Warehouse.

WebTrends Analytics 8 builds off the existing solution's functions for optimizing conversion scenarios and campaign and merchandising performance by making it easier for the entire organization to monitor key performance indicators. The new software uses visual analytics technology from Business Objects to provide a series of WebTrends Performance Dashboards.

"The solution needs to be able to provide top-line performance metrics," says Jason Palmer, VP of products at WebTrends. "So we're excited to announce an exclusive arrangement that we have with Business Objects, leveragint their Xcelsius tool to provide KPI performance dashboards. We believe this is a great way to be able to provide dashboards to the broad organization so that it's easy to measure [whether] you're on track or off track to budget."

The new dashboards, says Palmer, let users to set goals and view reports that track performance compared to those goals. They also allow for "what-if" analysis, enabling users to test merchandising strategies to see whether, for example, a promotion that lowers average order size but increases overall revenue and number of orders would help meet those goals. Geographic displays also let users see how traffic is performing in various geographies.

WebTrends Marketing Warehouse, the entirely new product, is designed to extend the analytics technology beyond analyzing site traffic and sales performance to pinpointing the behavior of individual customers on the Web site.

"This really starts to talk about the ability to build relationships with consumers," says Palmer. "It's no longer just a broad blast of emails that are going out, but it really becomes more focused on what you're trying to market to particular consumers or segments of your install base. And it really is focused on two-way communication. So if the consumer comes back to the Web site and expresses interest in certain products by looking at those, you want to re-market to those customers regarding the products that they expressed interest in."

Marketing Warehouse can be used by customer marketing experts, for instance, to isolate a group of customers based on a series of criteria - such as the search term that led them to the site, number of return visits, the products they investigated and the stage at which they abandoned their purchases - and trigger a marketing follow-up email designed specifically to their interests.

The marketing capabilities of the WebTrends Marketing Warehouse, says Palmer, represent the new objectives of Web analytics products, a key component of a new culture of marketing developing in response to the capabilities of Web marketing.

"We're seeing a driving need within the marketplace," he says, "for more targeted and efficient ways for companies to communicate with their customers. CMOs are under incredible pressure to provide accountability for their marketing spend. So it's no longer 'we're going to spend a billion dollars on brand advertising,' it's 'I have to show for the budget that I'm spending, how that's driving business results.' And it's very difficult to do that in a push model, but increasingly efficient in a pull model to be able to provide a metrics framework."