(IDG) -- Some Bear Stearns & Co. customers use the Web as their primary means of interacting with the investment bank. But this modern technology suffered from some of the same problems that banks faced in the days of gas lights: It was dimly lit.

Bear Stearns -- as with many businesses that offer extensive services on the Web -- lacked a clear and bright picture of what its customers were doing at the Web site.

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The firm has since installed high-end Web monitoring software. And, according to analysts, that move is part of an emerging trend among businesses to make increasingly larger investments in their Web sites as concerns grow that some of that money is going to waste.

Companies "want to know what their return on investment is," said Steve Solberg, an analyst at Giga Information Group in Cambridge, Mass. "If you're going to spend $2 million to get your Web site up, you'll want to know how it's performing," he said.

The New York-based securities trading and brokerage firm used a "subjective approach" to try to glean intelligence about its customers, said David Devera, managing director of new media at Bear Stearns.

"We would toss things on the 'net and hope to hear back from our clients, either through E-mail or the sales force passing on comments to us," said Devera. "We were really winging it."

Web monitoring tools provide detailed analysis of Web site traffic and show how a site is being used, as they track customers and provide custom reports. Some of these tools develop reports based on analyzing traffic logs; others monitor the network for information. The tools are generally expensive, however, and can cost anywhere from around $10,000 to more than $30,000.

The high-end monitoring products all aim to deliver a unified customer portrait that links customers' interaction with their previous activity on the Web site, as well as with other market data. But the tools still fall short in delivering a complete customer picture, said Don DePalma, an analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.

"Understand that the solutions are not complete, but it's a very key first step in starting to get your hands around your customer base," DePalma said.

Devera said Bear Stearns is using a tool by Net.Genesis Corp. in Cambridge, Mass., that will give the bank a better idea of where to focus its Web development money by tracking exactly what users do on the site. "It pretty much gives us an idea of what types of information they are trying to gather from our Web site," he said.

Before Scott Kahn, the director of Internet services at NetObjects, Inc., arrived at the company a year ago, it didn't have any real Web tracking in place.

Redwood City, Calif.-based NetObjects has since put in a Web monitoring tool by Andromedia, Inc. in San Francisco. It is used to garner sales leads from domain names, to design the Web site and determine what pages on the site are attracting customers, among other chores.

For instance, if NetObjects sees that a lot of traffic is coming from Internet service providers at connection speeds of 33.6k bit/sec. or slower, that will influence page design. "That impacts a lot of what you can or can't do on your pages," Kahn said.