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If your business is looking to webinars to reach potential customers, Bob Darabant of Astaro has a couple of tips that might keep your cast from falling flat. Hint: Making it sales-focused is probably not the answer. Darabant, VP of Astaro Americas, has a handful of suggestions for making webcasts work for VARs – but these apply pretty well to any business that might be pondering a webcast.

Webtrends announced yesterday that it acquired real-time analytics company Reinvigorate from (mt) Media Temple Ventures. The move rounds out Webtrends' strategy of tying together Web, mobile and social analytics by bringing in a real-time component. The acquisition will also bring a new set of data visualization tools to Webtrends, including heat maps, link maps and visitor path analysis.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

If any company has a comprehensive view of Web browsing behavior, it's Google. Not only does the company see plenty of traffic to its own properties, but thanks to Google Analytics, the search giant has plenty of insight into average site metrics Web-wide. Not only that, Google shares the data from sites that have opted in to share their data anonymously – and KISSmetrics has packaged up the results into a handy infographic. Among other things, it shows a drop in Windows users browsing the Web and referrals driving less traffic in 2011.

Real-time analytics company Mixpanel is rolling out a new feature today to give Web administrators a better sense of what's happening on their sites.

Like many analytics companies, such as Chartbeat, Mixpanel offers analytics that give people a macro view of what's happening on websites. But the new feature, launching today, gives insight at a micro-scale.

Tracking what you click on has been one of the fundamental pieces of Web analytics. But your clickthroughs represent only part of what you actually do online. Eye-tracking studies have often been seen as the best way to determine what people are actually thinking as they browse, but these sorts of experiments - until recently - have been either technology- or cost-prohibitive for many people.

But now researchers at Microsoft may have found an easier way to track where people are looking as they browse the Web. The new process doesn't actually utilize eye-tracking hardware, but rather uses the position of the cursor as a stand-in - where your cursor moves, where you hover, and of course sometimes where you click. According to their research, the cursor's position as actually a pretty good sign of what you're looking at and what's important, particularly when it comes to search results.

Google TV illustrates what changes when the cloud becomes a major factor in how people watch television. That effect is starting to change how we view Web analytics.

Web analytics helps a website owner improve any number of aspects to their site. Analytics define how advertisers spend their dollars. Cloud computing will disrupt that model as more people use their television sets to watch programs and use the Internet.

But how?

Google Analytics has quickly become a very popular Web analytics tool for publishers who want to learn more about their visitors. Not every user, however, is comfortable with the idea of giving even more data to Google and these publishers. Today, Google released the beta version of a browser plugin that allows users to opt-out of Google Analytics tracking. The plugin is available for Internet Explorer (versions 7 and 8), Google Chrome (4 and higher), and Mozilla Firefox (3.5 and higher).

Not every click is created equal. While publishers know exactly how many visitors per day their sites get, this aggregate data doesn't say much about the actual value of the individual visitors and what they do on the rest of the Web. Social media analytics and monitoring firm Sysomos wants to bridge this gap with its latest product: Sysomos Audience. Using proprietary technology, Audience can automatically assign a certain value to individual visitors, based on the other sites they visit and other factors users can tweak in the service's scoring engine.

At its annual F8 conference today, Facebook announced its new Facebook for Web Sites platform. Besides the new Graph API and all the plugins and new features Facebook developed on top of this, the company will also offer a new version of its Facebook Insights analytics service. Currently, Insights provides users data about their Facebook fan pages and social ads. Now, however, Facebook is taking this a step further and will also give users who implement Facebook's new features on their sites data about the people who share content from these sites, "no matter where those shares originated."

In a report covering web analytics from 2008 to the present day and forecasting the industry's future into 2014, tech research firm Forrester said this area is in an adolescent phase, working through critical changes and preparing for significant growth.

"Forrester forecasts that US businesses will spend $953 million dollars on Web analytics software in 2014, with an average compound annual growth rate of 17%," the report reads. "Growth will emerge from unexpected places as the value proposition of Web analytics technology oscillates for sophisticated analytics users and becomes more welcoming for new entrants. Ultimately, Web analytics will become part of a broader array of integrated services supporting marketers."