"Web analytics is the study of the behaviour of website visitors"
Web analytics is an essential part of any web marketing strategy and allow you to measure how successful (or unsuccessful!) your web marketing and search engine marketing activities are.
Why use web analytics?
Web analytics is a very wide area in which it is sometimes hard to understand where to start...but to put it simply, if you run a website, you need to know what's happening on it, how visitors behave, which pages are seen, where people drop out. All the data gathered through web analytics can then be turned into useful information for improvements: usability, navigation, conversions.
Web analytics is a very wide area in which it is sometimes hard to understand where to start...but to put it simply, if you run a website, you need to know what's happening on it, how visitors behave, which pages are seen, where people drop out. All the data gathered through web analytics can then be turned into useful information for improvements: usability, navigation, conversions.
The amount of information available from a website is virtually infinite, and that's why it is vital for any website owner to have a clear idea of the site's
objectives. Objectives can be quantitative as well as qualitative: attract x number of unique visitors a month, get people to subscribe to a newsletter, generate online leads, sell products or services online....
objectives. Objectives can be quantitative as well as qualitative: attract x number of unique visitors a month, get people to subscribe to a newsletter, generate online leads, sell products or services online....
Once these objectives have been defined, a set of online metrics need to be established and they will be used as a reference when reporting on website activity.
The metrics will have to be based on the site's objectives in order to
get an accurate view of how the site is performing.
The metrics will have to be based on the site's objectives in order to
get an accurate view of how the site is performing.
Web analytics solutions
There are a lot of web analytics solutions available on the market, some
free, some custom built. Most of them rely on page tracking, where a specific
bit of code (tracker) is added to the html source of each web page you want to analyse. Activity log analysing software such as FunnelWeb is also available, but the data collected through that method is harder to process and requires access to the raw website log activity files, which might be difficult to obtain.
Here are 2 of my favourite solutions:
There are a lot of web analytics solutions available on the market, some
free, some custom built. Most of them rely on page tracking, where a specific
bit of code (tracker) is added to the html source of each web page you want to analyse. Activity log analysing software such as FunnelWeb is also available, but the data collected through that method is harder to process and requires access to the raw website log activity files, which might be difficult to obtain.
Here are 2 of my favourite solutions:
- Google Analytics is the easiest way to enter the world of web analytics as it is free and simple to use. It is based on the tried and tested Urchin framework and provides a lot of information for beginners and experienced users.
- Webtrends is an overall more complete package and one of the world's leading web analytics solution. While being more tricky to set-up and harder to maintain, it gives website owners a lot of flexibility in terms of custom reporting.
More information
http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/