Introduction to Web Analytics

"Web Analytics is a tool which collects raw data of a website and turns into meaningful reports that will help marketers to measure and monitor the effectiveness of a website or online strategy and it also helps to understand the user behaviour."   

Methodology of collecting raw data

There are two ways of collecting the raw data of a web site.

1. Log based

2. Browser based (tagging)

Log Based:

Web Server will be configured to collect the user requests and store it in a text file which is otherwise called as log file. The log file includes visitors IP, date, time, band width, from where (referred page) user has come to the page, information on error and other useful information such as browser and operating system used by a user. Web Analytical tool reads the log file generated by the Web Server and interpret the raw logs into reports in legible format.

Browser Based:

Another method of analyzing a web site is Browser based, which requires a small JavaScript code to be embedded on every page of the web site. This code creates a unique cookie on the user computer. This JavaScript code collects all the above said information and sends to the Web Server.

I will share more about the difference between Log and Browser based web analysis in a separate article.

Uses of Web Analytics:

Web Analytics is useful for the people who do on-line business such as e-commerce, Advertising. It helps marketers or investors to forecast and take key decisions on their business.

How Web Analytics is used in business

Using this tool you can have answers for the following.

1. How your web site is performing?
2. How much traffic your web site getting ?
3. What is the trend of the traffic?
4. What are the key words used to reach your web site?
5. What are the various sources driving traffic to your web site?
6. Where did the users come from , what did they do and where did they go?
7. What is the most commonly used browser and OS?
8. What is the most commonly used screen resolution?
9. What is most viewed content (page) on your web site?
10. Geographic information, that is traffic are segmented by GEO.
11. How your campaign performing?
12. and more,

Growth of Web Analytics

The term "Web Analytics" is novel to most of the people including business and IT professionals. In early days business people used to analyze their website logs by themselves, this is how the Web Analytics was born. Then slowly companies started creating stand alone tool which analyzes the website log and gives the report. Recently few companies started developing very convenient web based web analytics solutions.

Trend of the search keyword - “Web Analytics” in Google, the below graph shows how/when did Web Analytics got popular in the internet.

  Scale is based on the average worldwide traffic of web analytics in all years from 2004 to December 2010.