Web Analytics

Overview

Web analytics describes the process of analyzing, understanding, and optimizing a website. The process involves collecting and implementing all data related to your server and visitors. Web analytics has become a very important and integral part of e-commerce and can help pinpoint which web pages most effectively promote product or service sales. Web analytics study the demographic distribution of visitors, navigation trends, and traffic patterns to determine the popularity and effectiveness of any given website. 

Web analytics software provides resources to constantly monitor trends. Using the information that you acquire, you can determine which areas of the website are most and least effective in promoting product sales and traffic. This kind of data provides helpful information for you to modify your business strategy.

Pay attention to certain metrics when you select a web analytics package. You will want to monitor hits, visits, unique visitors, page views, top entry and exit pages, referrers, search keywords, visit information, click paths, conversion, tracking registered users, and more advanced statistics. Analytics help you develop forecasting models based on your sales, customer, and product trends.

Benefits

Web analytics tools monitor and analyze website traffic. With little labor and effort, you can easily diagnose server problems while measuring the effectiveness of your marketing and advertising campaigns. You can integrate your web analytics results with your studies that measure sales, profit and loss rates, and market share. You can use the information to prepare reports and forecasting models. Based on your information, you can develop strategies to improve your business's performance.

How It Works

There are two methods that are used for website analysis: web server log file analysis and page tagging. With web server log file analysis, you can write a script to create a database of information from your log files. With page tagging, you can add a JavaScript code or image to collect the details about your page, visitors, and traffic.

Web analytics can be done both onsite and offsite. Onsite analysis tracks a visitor's experience with your particular website, and offsite web analysis includes measurements of a website's potential audience, comments, and visibility.

Tools will work in a variety of ways depending on your particular needs.

Companies/Brands

Unica, Omniture, and Core Metrics offer web analytical services. There are many websites like Google Analytics, Yahoo Web Analytics, and Piwik that offer online tools.