Analytics

Web Analytics

Web Analytics is the analysis of data to help you determine how people are interacting with your website. At the highest level, you will see statistics such as the number of visitors, the number of visits, the number of pages viewed and the how the visitor traversed your site. Modern web analytics products can actually track each users activity to know which navigational element was clicked, collect the price of items sold, the total sale, average sale and much more.

As with any of the modern packages to make the tracking work, a piece java script is added to each page. Then when a page is opened by the visitors, the browser executes the code sending the tracking information to the analytics server. The script also sets a cookie on the visitor’s machine so that return trips by the visitor can be monitored over a given period. This way when a person visits a site several times before making a purchase, the analytics tool can still attribute that sale to the referring source (ad campaign, banner ad, website).

As you might imagine, if you have a site that is engaged in eCommerce, this information can be critical to improving your checkout process. If you are in a service business, it may be helpful for you to see the steps viewers take before they contact you, especially if people who miss a step don’t contact you. And, if you are running ad campaigns, web analytics can help you determine which campaign is getting the best results.

Need Help Analyzing Your Traffic?

I provide Internet Marketing Services for local companies and have experience with Urchin, Omniture, and Google Analytics. If you are looking for someone to assist you with marketing on the on the web, contact me.

Hosted vs. Software Solutions

A number of the Web Analytics products are offered in either hosted or software versions. Each has its strengths. I have come to prefer the hosted solutions, as there are no servers to manage, no software to update, and a hosted solution can be configured to handle any load. As for security, learning that major players in the industry like eBay and Amazon rely on hosted solutions put my concerns to rest.

Google Analytics

While Google’s free Analytics tool won’t allow you to examine visitor information with the same granularity of a high-end product like Omniture’s Site Catalyst, it is a very capable tool and will meet the requirements of many sites. Google Analytics and Omniture are hosted products.

Web Statistics

Just a few years ago all that existed were web logs. Initially a tool for the IT department, web logs catalog raw traffic and navigation of your website. The logs entries are generated by the server as each access to the website is made. The visitors URL is collected along with the type of computer they are using and the web browser employed. As web use matured, management marketing and other departments began trying to extract usage data. The tools to view the data range dramatically, from basics products such as Awstats (free), to higher-level tools such as Urchin, and Unica which evolved to make better use of the information. Today much of this type of tracking has been surpassed by modern Web Analytics tools, however there is still good information that can be mined from this source. ClickTracks (good and inexpensive) and others offer a hybrid approach, combining web log data with the information that can be gained from inserting scripts on individual pages.

Good Articles on tracking ecommerce variabels with Google Analytics:

also see: getting started with web analytics