Web analytics is the collection, measurement, and reporting of data so that you can optimize web usage. It can be used for measuring web traffic, for market research, and for business. It gives out information on the number of visitors that have come to a website and how many people have viewed the page. It is useful because it helps gauge popularity trends and traffic on websites. It also can be used to find out if the website’s pages are working correctly. If it not working correctly, it can be corrected.
Web analytics has two categories. They are: on-site and off-site. On-site measures a visitor’s behavior when on your website. It measures how your commercial context is doing on your website. On-site is used to improve marketing for your website. Off-site refers to analysis and web measurement. It measures the website’s potential audience, the comments that are on the Internet, and the visibility of the website.
There are two technical ways that most people use for collecting data. There is server log file analysis and page tagging. Server log file reads the logfiles and page tagging makes image requests to a third party server. Both of these collect data for web traffic reports. There are advantages to both of these files. For log file, the raw data is available, you don’t have to make changes to your website, you can switch programs easily if you want to, it requires no additional TCP slow starts or DNS lookups, and more. For page tagging, it can report on events that don’t involve a request to the web server, it has become a standard thing in web analytics, it can be used even if you don’t have access to your own web servers, it may have access to more information on the user or web client, counting starts by opening the page so that you don’t have to request it from a server, and more.
So as you can see, web analytics is a good thing to use if you are looking for data about your website so that you can improve it and gain more customers.