I would like a web analytics platform that focused on the results of analysis and not the numbers. I came up with the idea of visitor profiles that could be used to gauge the high level understanding of visitors. Then when you want to truly understand your visitors you dive into the data along with your masters degree.

My idea for profiles consists of grouping many data points into categories. Here are just 4 profiles for an average site, many more could be created based on the content and focus of the site. These profiles can be adjusted to look at data for the whole site or simply sections of it:

Bouncer - The type of visitor that reaches your site and leaves immediately, something often seen when users visit from banners or paid search links. Less than 2 page views in 30 seconds or less.
Browser - A visitor that wants to see everything on the site, yet they don’t stay anywhere long enough to actually intake the content. Views 90% of the pages on the site in less than 30 seconds per page (thus a site of 40 pages would consider a visitor a Browser even with a session of 18 minutes.)
Enthusiast - Someone that really explores and gains something by visiting your site. Views at least 40% of the site, but also performs such actions such as viewing videos to completion, filling out registration/send to friend forms, downloads content (basically a visitor that interacts with the content.)
Casual - This is the default bucket, they didn’t bounce, they didn’t try to surf the whole site faster than Michael Phelps and they didn’t interact a lot.)

These profiles can then be used to determine how the site is being used as a whole. So if your site launched a new feature and Bouncers increased overall or simply in that section then you need to look into why that happened. Or if changed your layout or navigation flow or appearance and Browsers weer the most popular profile, then you could establish that visitors were just trying to understand the new flow or were even lost trying to find the content they wanted. What you gather from the results may be speculative, but I’m sure it’s more than knowing that 1,675 visitors viewed 1.37 page views per session.

UPDATE: A while ago I found Quantcast and found it interesting but at the time it didn’t have a very significant base of data.  But now that the company is a few years older, and to complete some more research into the space of Web Analytics I came across them again today.  They have on their site a similiar concept to my ideas, that they label “Site Frequency”.  I think this is right direction and should be something that they should expand on and make more prominent in their dashboard of data.