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Introduction
The measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of web data in order to understand and optimize web usage is known as web analytics. Web analytics is more than just a process for measuring web traffic but a type of technology for digital market intelligence; it can also be used as a tool for business and market research, as well as to assess and improve the effectiveness of a website and it’s user experience (UX).
Web analytics applications can also assist businesses in measuring the effectiveness of traditional print or broadcast advertising campaigns.
It can be used to predict how traffic to a website will change after a new advertising campaign is launched. Web analytics provides data on the number of visitors to a website as well as the number of page views.
It assists in gauging traffic and popularity trends, which is beneficial for market research.
Technologies leveraged by Web Analytics systems
(Example of a ClickPath analysis tool)
Web analytics can be divided into two types: off-site and on-site.
Off-site web analytics refers to web measurement and analysis that takes place regardless of whether a person owns or maintains a website.
It includes assessing a website’s potential audience (opportunity), share of voice (visibility), and buzz (comments/engagement) on the Internet as a whole.
On-site web analytics, the most common method, measures user behavior once they arrive at a specific page. Conversions, such as which landing pages were used to make a purchase, the countries and language been used, search terms used to find the website and much more. On-site web analytics evaluates the commercial performance of a particular website and its pages/content.
This data is typically compared to key performance indicators for performance and is used to improve the audience response to a website or marketing campaign. Some tools also allow you to create heatmaps and record session replays from the user’s browser.
Web analytics has traditionally been used to track onsite engagement. On-site web analytics software and services are available from a variety of vendors. There are two main technical methods for gathering data.
The first and most common method, server log file analysis, reads log files in which the web server records file requests made by browsers.
Examples of analytics products:
There are many different products on the market that provide web analytics here are some common ones:
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free analytics suite provided by Google and globally is the most popular tool used across millions of different websites.
Google Analytics allows website owners to track different metrics such as:
- Number of hits to each page
- Most common countries and languages
- Keywords used by visitors in search results to find your website
- Sources of traffic to the website in percentages (Search, direct, referral and social)
- Bounce rate and flow of navigation (e.g. user landed on page 1 then went to page 2 and to page 3 and eventually used the call button to make a phone call).
Yandex Metrica
Yandex is a Russian search engine but also provides a number of tools including a tool called Metrica which provides functionality very similar to Google Analytics and includes all the marketing insight you would need to help optimize your website and user experience.
Webalizer
The Webalizer is web log analysis software that generates analysis web pages based on access and usage logs.
It is one of the most widely used tools for web server administration.
Bradford L. Barrett founded it in 1997. Webalizer frequently reports statistics such as hits, visits, referrers, visitor countries, and data downloaded.
These statistics can be viewed graphically and presented in a variety of time frames, including day, hour, and month. It is often pre-installed on many servers and internet hosting setups including hosting services offered by us.
If your in need of someone to help you setup an analytics solution or help you make better data driven decisions we are an SEO company based in Victoria and can help you with this.
Conclusion
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AGR Technology is a privately held Australian business that provides digital services to other businesses such as digital marketing, software development, and web design and hosting.
Learn more about our solutions by visiting our blog and watching our videos.
Related links from our glossary:
IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-service)
CDN (Content Delivery Network)
Sources/Citations:
KTB, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Web analytics. (2021, May 08). Retrieved May 14, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_analytics
Webalizer. (2021, May 05). Retrieved May 14, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webalizer