Web analytics is the collection, measurement, analysis and reporting of web data for the purpose of understanding and optimizing web usage. Though web analytics is not just a process for measuring web traffic but can also be used as a tool for market research, and to improve the effectiveness of a website. Web analytics applications help companies to measure the results of broadcast advertising campaigns. It provides information about the number of visitors to a website and the number of page views.

When you’re analysing the data, you just need to read the provided data in this era of digital systems. You just need to have an idea of what you are looking for when you are analysing. There is not anything new to learn to become an expert in this.

Basic steps of the Web Analytics Process

Most web analytics processes have basic four steps, which are:

1. Collection of data: This stage is the collection of basic data.

2. Processing of data into information: This stage is the conversion of data into information by some counts.

3. Developing KPI: This stage focuses on using counts and implanting them with business strategies, which is known as Key Performance Indicators(KPI).

4. Formulating online strategy: This stage concerns with online goals and objectives for the business. Strategies here are mostly related to making money, saving money, increasing market share.

Web Analytics Technologies

There are at least 2 categories of web analytics, which are:

1. Off-site web analytics: It refers to web measurement and analysis regardless of whether you own or maintain the website. It includes the measurement of a website’s potential audience, share of voice, and buzz that is happening on the internet as a whole.

2. On-site web analytics: It is the most common category. It includes conversations and measures the performance of your website in a commercial context. This data is typically compared against KPIs for performance improvement. Google Analytics is the most widely used on-site web analytics service.

Why do we need Analytics?

Till now, we know what is analytics and now we will know why we need analytics. For a website to be successful, it has to satisfy the expectations of its targeted audiences about your product. For this, you need to be aware of the number of visits, most visited pages, count of visits that can be converted into customers, age group and many more. Web analytics does all these for you. There are few tools available in the market which can make these tasks a piece of cake.

2 key ideas which can increase the importance of analytics:

1. Understand your standing in the market, and understand your potential customers by age group, geographical location, which gives you the control to act accordingly.

2. Get a precise count of your income to the investment you made for and take necessary actions based on the result.

Some key factors you need to know

• Web Traffic - A high-traffic site is a happy site. Total visits to your site indicates whether your site is growing, stabilizing, or reducing. Web traffic is measured to see the popularity of web sites and individual pages or sections within a site. This can be done by viewing the traffic statistics found in the web server log file, an automatically generated list of all the pages served.

• Traffic Sources - Traffic source metrics indicate where your visitors are coming from. Google Analytics breaks traffic sources down into four categories: Organic (search engines), referral (another site), direct (by typing your domain name into a browser) and social (social media). It also shows us missed opportunities. For example, if your traffic is coming from Google or another site, and you might be thinking of social media as a source.

• Top Pages - It displays the top viewed pages for the time period you have selected. This is a good indicator as to which pages should be most accessible to your visitors through navigation, as this is the content they are seeking

• Bounce Rate - The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave your site after going to the homepage. Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell you why visitors are bouncing, you’ll have to do some quantitative research to find that out.

• Conversion Rate - A conversion in this manner is a new subscriber, social share, a new download, or any number of things. When your audience becomes your potential customer, it is conversion. To get started with conversion tracking, you need to set some goals. Google Analytics provides this with its goal templates, but you can also set your custom goals. After implementing these, you can begin analysing performance data across various visitor segments.

By now, you should have a basic understanding of how analytics works. Of course, there are other tools available in the market for analytics, but Google Analytics is one of the widely used tools so we emphasised on that.

Happy Analysing :)