What exactly is web analytics?
Web Analytics refers to the analysis and measurement of data that helps to provide the user’s behavior on web pages.
Analytics platforms monitor the amount of activity and behaviour on a site for instance, the number of users who visit the site, how long they remain and how many pages they browse, what pages they go to and whether they come via a hyperlink or not.
Companies use web analytics platforms to evaluate and benchmark website performance as well as analyze important performance indicators that guide their business, like the rate at which customers convert purchases.
Why web analytics are crucial
There’s a saying in the business world that anything worth doing is something worth taking measurements of.
Website analytics can provide insight and information that can be used to design an improved user experience for site visitors.
Understanding how customers behave is crucial to optimize a website to meet the most important conversion metrics.
For instance web analytics can reveal the most popular pages on your site as well as the most popular ways to buy.
With web analytics, you are able to precisely monitor the success of your online advertising campaigns to aid in planning future campaigns.
What is the role of web analytics?
The majority of analytics tools “tag” their websites by putting an ad-hoc snippet of JavaScript within the page’s code.
By using this tag tool for analytics will count each time the website is visited by a user or click. The tag also collects additional information, such as the device, browser and geographical area (via an IP address).
Web analytics providers may utilize cookies to track individual sessions , and to identify repeat visits from the same web browser.
Since certain users remove cookies, and some browsers have different restrictions on code fragments, no analytics tool can guarantee 100% precision of its data. Also, different tools may yield somewhat different results.
Sample web analytics data
Data from Web Analytics is generally displayed in dashboards that may be customized according to user personas dates, time ranges, and other aspects. Data is divided into categories, like:
Audience data
- the number of visits, and the number of number of visits, unique
- new vs. returning visitor ratio
- the country from which they come from.
- which device or browser they’re using (desktop or. mobile)
The behavior of an audience
- common landing pages
- common exit page
- Pages that are frequently visited
- the length of time that is spent per visit
- The number of pages viewed per number of pages per
- bounce rates
Campaign data
- which campaigns drove the highest traffic
- which websites are the most frequently referred to by in terms of traffic
- the keyword searches that led to which websites were visited
- media breakdown for campaigns for example, email and. social media
