This is the fifth in a series of stories about retailers bolstering their Web sites in time for 2004 holiday sales. Read about how Wine.com and Urban Outfitters revamped their Web search capabilities, how Musicland  is piloting real-time messaging services , and how TJX streamlined its Web checkout processes.

The Web site that Fingerhut shoppers see this holiday season is substantially different from last year's Web site. New technology deployed at the close of 2003 helped shape a year of design refinements, says Mike Sidders, director of e-commerce and new customer acquisition at Fingerhut in Minnetonka, Minn.

The technology is Web analytics software from Coremetrics. With it, Fingerhut gained much-needed visibility into how visitors were using its Web site -- and used the information it gleaned to prepare for the next critical holiday shopping season.

"This is make or break right now," Sidders says. "Certainly we conduct business 365 days a year, but all of our focus from a strategic standpoint is geared to the period from Oct. 1 to Dec. 31."

Armed with analytic insight, Fingerhut has been making tweaks to its site all year long. "So when we hit the fourth quarter, we have a Web site that is substantially different from what it might have been if we hadn’t had visibility to how our customers were interacting with the Web site," Sidders says.

With the Coremetrics software, Fingerhut can keep tabs on broad measurements such as top-line sales, or more granular stats such as the conversion rate for a specific area of the retailer's Web site. "It really gives you the ability to be as macro or micro as you choose," Sidders says.

In particular, the Coremetrics analytics software called attention to a huge number - as high as 55% - of product searches on Fingerhut's site that turned up zero results for customers. It's a problem the catalog and Web retailer didn't even know existed until it deployed the Coremetrics software.

"We were surprised at how bad our failed searches were. That was a complete shock to us," Sidders says.

While Sidders knew Fingerhut's existing search capability was rudimentary, he had no idea how many customers were turned away by it. "Without that visibility, we never would have known how bad it was, and we wouldn't have taken the steps as aggressively as we did to salvage that portion of our business."