Web analytics
Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of web data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.
Description
Web analytics is not just a tool for measuring web traffic but can be used as a tool for business and market research, and to assess and improve the effectiveness of a website. Web analytics applications can also help companies measure the results of traditional print or broadcast advertising campaigns. It helps one to estimate how traffic to a website changes after the launch of a new advertising campaign. Web analytics provides information about the number of visitors to a website and the number of page views. It helps gauge traffic and popularity trends which is useful for market research.
There are two categories of web analytics:
- Off-site web analytics
- On-site web analytics
Off-site web analytics
Off-site web analytics refers to web measurement and analysis regardless of whether you own or maintain a website. It includes the measurement of a website's potential audience (opportunity), share of voice (visibility), and buzz (comments) that is happening on the Internet as a whole.
On-site web analytics
On-site web analytics measure a visitor's behavior once on your website. This includes its drivers and conversions; for example, the degree to which different landing pages are associated with online purchases.
On-site web analytics measures the performance of your website in a commercial context. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators for performance, and used to improve a website or marketing campaign's audience response.
Google Analytics is the most widely used on-site web analytics service; although new tools are emerging that provide additional layers of information, including heat maps and session replay.
Historically, web analytics has been used to refer to on-site visitor measurement. However, in recent years this meaning has become blurred, mainly because vendors are producing tools that span both categories.
See also
- Clickstream
- Hit (Internet)
- HTTP cookie
- Internet traffic
- IP Address
- Internet Protocol
- Eurocrypt
- Geolocation
- Geolocation software
- Geotargeting
- Google Analytics
- List of web analytics software
- Mobile Web Analytics
- Online advertising
- Online video analytics
- Page view
- Post-click marketing
- Unique user
- Usage share of web browsers
- Web beacon
- Web bug
- Website correlation
- Website localization
- Web log analysis software
- Web mining
- Web traffic
- Web traffic generation model
External links
- Web analytics Wikipedia
