WEB ANALYTICS

Dr. B. Upendra Rao, MBA, Ph.D

Asst. Professor,
Presidency University
Course Content

Module – 1: Introduction of Web Analytics

Web Analytics – Introduction – Importance – Scope – Web Analytics Process – History of Web Analytics –
Overview in different mediums of Web Analytics - Data collection methods in Web Analytics – Data Analysis &
Web Survey Analysis – KPI’s in Web Analytics: Introduction to KPI, characteristics, Need for KPI, Perspective of
KPI, Uses of KPI.
Module – 2: Web Metrics
Web Metrics: Common metrics: Hits, Page views, Visits, Unique visitors, Unique page views, Bounce, Bounce
rate, Page/visit, Average time on site, new visits; Optimization (e-commerce, non-e-commerce sites):
Improving bounce rates, Optimizing Adwords campaigns; Real time report, Audience report, Traffic source
report, Custom campaigns, Content report
Introduction to Web Analytics
 Define web analytics:
The collection, measurement, analysis, and reporting of web data
for
understanding and optimizing web usage.
 Emphasize its importance in the digital age.
Why Web Analytics Matters
•Significance of web analytics:
• Improve website performance.
• Enhance user experience.
• Drive marketing and sales strategies.
• Make data-driven decisions.
Key Metrics and Concepts
•Web analytics terms and concepts:
• Pageviews, sessions, and users.
• Bounce rate and exit rate.
• Conversion rate and goals.
• Traffic sources (organic, direct, referral).
• Click-through rate (CTR). Tools and Platforms
•Popular web analytics tools:
• Google Analytics.
• Adobe Analytics.
• Matomo (formerly Piwik).
• Mixpanel.
• Webtrends.
Practical Applications
•Examples of how web analytics can be applied:
• Tracking e-commerce sales.
• Measuring marketing campaign effectiveness.
• Optimizing website content.
• Monitoring user behavior.
• A/B testing for website improvements. Benefits of Web Analytics
•Benefits of using web analytics:
Interpreting Data • Improved ROI.
•Discuss the importance of data interpretation: • Enhanced user experience.
• Analyzing reports and dashboards. • Better decision-making.
• Identifying trends and insights. • Competitive advantage.
• Making data-driven decisions.
Module – 3: Web Analytics Tools

Web Analytics Tools: Types of Web Analytics Tools: Customer Analytics – Usability (UX) Analytics - Product
Analytics – Marketing Analytics – Social Media Analytics – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Analytics –
General Enterprise Analytics – Open source Web Analytics
Module – 4: Google Analytics

Google Analytics: Brief introduction and working, Adwords, Benchmarking, Categories of traffic: Organic
traffic, Paid traffic, Google analytics – Audience Analysis – Acquisition Analysis – Behaviour Analysis –
Conversion Analysis – Creating dash boards using google analytics report- Limitations, Performance
concerns, Privacy issues.
Module – 5: Trends in Web Analytics

Emerging Trends in Web Analytics: Social Media Analytics: Social Media Audience Analytics - Drawing
Meaningful Insights - Reporting Social Media Analytics – E-Commerce Analytics: Product Recommendations
– Market Basket Analytics – Price Optimization – Demand Forecasting, Mobile Analytics.

Web Analytics By Dr. B. Upendra Rao, Assistant Professor, Presidency University, Bangalore
What is web analytics?
Web Analytics is the method of monitoring how users interact with an
website/online presence. It looks at their behaviours and their activities
and provides you reports which help you to understand how people
consumed your content.
This data includes things like
 how many users visit the site,
 how long they stay for,
 how many pages they end up visiting and
 which pages they visit, and
 how they actually end up getting onto the site in the first
place.
Importance & Scope of Web Analytics

Every successful business is based on its ability to understand and utilize

the data provided by its customers, competitors, and partners.
Importance & Scope of Web Analytics (Contd…)

1. Measure online traffic

Web analytics will tell you:
•How many users and visitors you have on your website at any given time.
•Where do they come from?
•What are they doing on the website?
•How much time are they spending on the website?
2. Tracking Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate in analytics means that a user who has visited the website leaves
without interacting with it.
A high bounce rate might tell us the following:
•The users didn’t feel that content was for them, or it didn’t match well
with the search query.
•A weak user experience overall.
Importance & Scope of Web Analytics (Contd…)

3. Optimizing and Tracking of Marketing Campaigns

For different marketing campaigns, online or offline can be created unique and
specific links that can be tracked. Tracking these unique links will provide you with
details on how these marketing campaigns have been received by the users and if
it’s been profitable.
4. Finding the Right Target Audience and its Capitalization
In marketing, it’s crucial to find the right target audience for your products and
services. An accurate target group will improve the profitability of marketing
campaigns and leave a positive mark on the company itself. Web analytics will
provide companies with information to create and find the right target audiences.
Finding the audience will help companies create marketing materials that leave a
positive feeling to their customers.
The right marketing campaigns to the right audiences will increase sales,
conversions, and make a website better.
Importance & Scope of Web Analytics (Contd…)

5. Improves and Optimizes Website and Web Services

With web analytics, a company will find potential problems on its website and its
services.
For example, a bad and unclear sales funnel on an online store will decrease the
number of purchases, thus declining revenue.
Users must find the right content at the right time when they are on the site.
Creating specific landing pages for different purposes could also help.
Tracking the performance of the mobile versions is an example of how to make a
better experience for the users.
6. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Only through the utilization of web analytics websites can improve their conversion
optimizations. The goal of CRO is to make users do tasks assigned to them. The
conversion rate is calculated when received goals are divided by the number of
users. There are many conversion a website should measure, and every business
The funnel, which is also sometimes referred to as a marketing funnel or revenue funnel, illustrates the
should measure those that are most important to their business.
idea that every sale begins with a large number of potential customers and ends with a much smaller
number of people who actually make a purchase.
Importance & Scope of Web Analytics Contd..

A list of few conversion anyone can start with:

 Every step of a sales funnel (add to carts, purchases, product views,
etc.)
 Leads
 Newsletter sign ups
 Registrations
 Video Views
 Brochure downloads
 Clicks on text-links
 Bids and offers
 Event registrations
 Spent time on a website
 Shares on social media
 Contacts from contact forms.
Importance & Scope of Web Analytics Contd..

7. Tracking business goals online

 A thriving business and its website have to have clear goals it tries to achieve.
 With web analytics, companies can create specific goals to track. Measuring
goals actively allows reacting faster to certain events through data.
 As important as creating goals is, it’s also important to know what goals any given
business should track. Not every goal online is created equal, thus tracking too
many goals could become an issue for a business.
 Always track goals that measure the effectiveness, profitability, and weaknesses
of certain events.
8. Improve the results from Google Ads and Facebook ads
Analytics has a major role when it comes to managing online advertisements.
The data tells us how much the online advertisements have produced clicks,
conversions, and how the ads have been received by the target audience.
For example, discovering through data which are the most common mistakes of
Google Ads, can drastically improve results and increase the efficiency of ads.
Web Analytics Process
Web Analytics Process (Contd..)

1.Setting goals. The first step in the web analytics process is for businesses to
determine goals and the end results they are trying to achieve. These goals can
include increased sales, customer satisfaction and brand awareness. Business
goals can be both quantitative and qualitative.
2.Collecting data. The second step in web analytics is the collection and storage
of data. Businesses can collect data directly from a website or web analytics tool,
such as Google Analytics. The data mainly comes from Hypertext Transfer
Protocol requests -- including data at the network and application levels -- and can
be combined with external data to interpret web usage. For example, a
user's Internet Protocol address is typically associated with many factors, including
geographic location and clickthrough rates.
3.Processing data. The next stage of the web analytics funnel involves businesses
processing the collected data into actionable information.
Web Analytics Process (Contd..)

4. Identifying key performance indicators (KPIs). In web analytics, a KPI is a

quantifiable measure to monitor and analyze user behavior on a website. Examples
include bounce rates, unique users, user sessions and on-site search queries.
5. Developing a strategy. This stage involves implementing insights to formulate
strategies that align with an organization's goals. For example, search queries
conducted on-site can help an organization develop a content strategy based on
what users are searching for on its website.
6. Experimenting and testing. Businesses need to experiment with different
strategies in order to find the one that yields the best results. For example, A/B
testing is a simple strategy to help learn how an audience responds to different
content. The process involves creating two or more versions of content and then
displaying it to different audience segments to reveal which version of the content
performs better.
Web Analytics Process (Contd..)

Categories of Web Analytics

Off-site web analytics
The term off-site web analytics refers to the practice of monitoring visitor activity
outside of an organization's website to measure potential audience. Off-site web
analytics provides an industrywide analysis that gives insight into how a business is
performing in comparison to competitors. It refers to the type of analytics that
focuses on data collected from across the web, such as social media, search
engines and forums.
On-site web analytics
On-site web analytics refers to a narrower focus that uses analytics to track the
activity of visitors to a specific site to see how the site is performing. The data
gathered is usually more relevant to a site's owner and can include details on site
engagement, such as what content is most popular. Two technological approaches
to on-site web analytics include log file analysis and page tagging.
History of Web Analytics

Almost 30 years since its inception, the

World Wide Web has come a long way.
1990 – THE BIRTH OF THE WORLD WIDE
The Internet is essentially a constant dialogue of HTML code,
WEB
flowing back and forth between a web user and a web server.
1993 – LOG FILES, CREATION OF
WEBTRENDS
Each time a certain HTML element is requested by a visitor, it is called a “hit” and is
recorded into a log file. A hit may include text on a web page, an image, sound or a
video file. However, during its modest beginnings, the Internet was comprised of
mostly static pages limited to text and links. Therefore, when a page received a hit
by a visitor, it was assumed that they were engaging with the entire contents of the
page. As web usage increased, website owners became preoccupied with this
metric.
The development of log file analysis paved the path that led
to the beginning of commercial web analytics, which was
marked by the founding of WebTrends in 1993.
History of Web Analytics Contd..

1995 – CREATION OF ANALOG

Dr. Stephen Turner created Analog — the first log file analysis program to be
completely free of charge. Until this time, web analytics could only be understood by
tech teams, but Analog made the reports generated through log files more
comprehensible to online business owners, with clear documentation and visual
graphs. Finally, web analytics could be used by marketing professionals, as well.
1996 – HIT COUNTERS
Web-Counter, the first widely used hosted hit counter service, was born. This
sparked the trend of odometer-style hit counters being displayed on website landing
pages.
Accrue, Omniture, and WebSideStory were founded.
1997 – JAVASCRIPT TAGS
As webpages began to include visuals and other elements besides text, it became
clear that the number of hits a server accumulated no longer represented the
number of pages requested. Javascript tagging became the new method of data
collection to accurately report on diverse web traffic and trends. This is still the most
JAVASCRIPT
TAGS
2004 – THE CREATION OF THE WEB ANALYTICS ASSOCIATION
(WAA)
Web analytics became more established as an essential tool for web optimization,
providing increasingly complex solutions that reported massive amounts of data.
The Web Analytics Association (WAA), now known as the Digital Analytics
Association, was born.
2005 – GOOGLE BUYS URCHIN & LAUNCHES GOOGLE
ANALYTICS
Google Analytics quickly became the most widely used web analytics service on
the market. Focusing heavily on quantitative analysis, it tied in directly with
2006 – THE
Google’s other BIRTH
web marketing offerings.
OF CLICKTALE (NOW CONTENTSQUARE) & IN-
PAGE ANALYTICS
The launch of In-Page analytics allowed website owners to see everything their
visitors did on a webpage. Video session playbacks of visitor behavior delivered
qualitative usability and conversion-based data, while heatmaps and form analytics
provided online businesses with both quantitative statistics and qualitative
behavioral data about website visitors.
 2006 – THE BIRTH OF CLICKTALE (NOW
CONTENTSQUARE) & IN-PAGE ANALYTICS

Clicktale (now Contentsquare) was established to offer

solutions for businesses seeking conversion rate
optimization, improved customer experience and increased
user engagement through data sourced from analytics
2012 – UNIVERSAL ANALYTICS
Google launched Universal Analytics, meaning that users could be
tracked across multiple devices and platforms through user IDs. Beyond
that, offline behavior began to be monitored, and customer data became
richer with the addition of demographic and other information.
Google Analytics for mobile apps was also launched, supplying app
analytics via SDKs for Android and iOS. The world of web analytics grew
to include the now standard mobile analytics.
2016 – MACHINE LEARNING ON MOBILE
Google Analytics incorporated machine learning into its app analytics,
giving marketers smarter insights on the go. This enabled a streamlined
mobile Google Analytics experience, showing more relevant metrics,
with real-time monitoring. This was a turning point in the analytics
industry. In 2016, Google Analytics incorporated
machine learning which gave marketers
smarter insights, real-time monitoring,
along with all the other revenant metrics.
There was more and more data being used,
and insights gathered from social profiles,
user behaviors. Marketers and smart
businesses could begin creating more
targeted advertising, optimizing their
website copy, improve their A/B tests, and
The market was flooded with new tools and tacticsmuch more. and
to optimize
enhance businesses present online.
2017 – THE CLICKTALE (NOW CONTENTSQUARE) EXPERIENCE
CLOUD
By combining cognitive computing, machine learning and psychological
research, the Clicktale (now Contentsquare) Experience Cloud was
launched to solve critical digital questions for enterprises and enable
them to provide top-quality customer experience. The new platform
helps businesses better understand customer intent and behavior, and
quantify impacts in order to more efficiently prioritize optimization tasks.
This is made possible through the use of intuitive workflows and
visualizations. The Clicktale (now Contentsquare) Experience Cloud
pushes new frontiers, synthesizing complex behavioral patterns based
on millisecond-level actions.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Web and app design are heavily influenced by analytics: you wouldn’t
dream of designing your websites or apps without A/B testing and
tweaking. Now, as the development of UX and UI is done hand in hand
with derived insights from web analytics, this bond becomes ever
stronger. The future is about optimizing this relationship as well as
optimizing the insights accrued, in order to deliver maximum satisfaction
to both customer and enterprise. Machine learning and cognitive
computing are the focus of current web analytics evolution, and
analytics providers continue to innovate in the field.
Mediums of Web Analytics/Tools of Web
Analytics:

1.Content analytics tools

2.Customer analytics tools
3.Usability (UX) analytics tools
4.A/B and multivariate testing tools
5.Social media analytics tools
6.SEO analytics tools
7.General enterprise analytics tools
8.Open source web analytics tools
9.Product analytics tools
Some of the things that website analytics tools can tell you

include:

 How do people find your site? What do they do after they get

there?

 Which content on your site do people engage with? When and

how are they engaging with it?

 Why do some people buy and others don’t? How can you get
1.Content analytics
A tools
content marketing analytics platform designed specifically for measuring the
performance of content. It offers an alternative to general-purpose web analytics
tools for content teams to find valuable insights that help them make decisions.
Content teams can see real-time and historical data in a central dashboard, and
they can easily sort and filter it by type, author, channel, source, and more.
Everyone on the content team, from directors to editors to writers, can use it
easily.
2. Customer analytics tools
Customer analytics tools go deeper into customer behavior than other general
web analytics tools. These tools pull in customer data from various mediums like
web, mobile, email, and your product. You can create segments based on
behavioral patterns, then predict and offer the products and services those distinct
groups of customers might buy.
3. Usability (UX) analytics tools
Usability analytics tools are specialized tools that let businesses analyze what users
do on a page. They record how people interact with the page and its elements, so an
online marketing or product team can evaluate how different features are received.
With these insights, businesses can then make changes to the page or user interface
and see how those changes play out by measuring user behavior.
4. A/B and multivariate testing tools
You can run the occasional simple A/B test using a general web analytics tool. But if
you plan to test and optimize elements of your website regularly, you will benefit from
a dedicated testing tool. And if you plan to run multivariate testing, which tests
multiple variables on a page at once, you’ll definitely need a tool like one of the
following to accurately interpret results.
5. Social media analytics tools
Social web analytics tools are important for businesses focused on growing
audiences and engagement on social media. While other tools may offer some
features to help with this — for example, Parse.ly includes social media data for
your content — you will need a dedicated tool if your business depends heavily on
social media engagement. Some social analytics tools provide analysis only, while
others let you manage your posts, too.
6. SEO analytics tools
If you use search engine optimization to attract traffic from search engines, you
most certainly need a specialized SEO tool in your web analytics tool stack. These
tools provide data on keywords to point out new opportunities to gain traffic. They
also give you data on backlinks pointing to a website. This is key because the
number and quality of links pointing to a website are an important ranking factor for
Google.
7. General enterprise analytics tools
Those businesses that deal with large amounts of data face unique challenges and
thus need tools designed to handle them. Enterprise-level web analytics tools are
solutions designed especially for businesses with massive amounts of data —
visitors that number in the hundreds of thousands or millions per month. At that
point, you start to face challenges in separating the valuable data from the noise,
data inaccuracies, and sampling errors and gaining the insights you need in a timely
manner.
8. Open source web analytics tools
Open source web analytics tools give you more freedom and control over your data
than cloud-hosted solutions like those above. Your IT team can use and modify the
source code to build your own customized in-house software, so you can store and
analyze data how you prefer. This type of software is all on-premise because you
will store it — and all the data in it — on your own servers. You are then responsible
for maintaining and updating the software, too.
9. Product analytics tools
Product analytics tools measure how people interact with and use a digital
technology product or app rather than a website. These analytics tools are used
by product development teams to improve the user experience. They can see if
users are interacting with a new feature, for example, or if it’s causing friction for
them, and then make changes accordingly. Some product analytics tools also
measure data from your website in addition to that of your product.
Data collection methods in Web Analytics

Data collection is the process of gathering data for use in business decision-
making, strategic planning, research and other purposes. It's a crucial part of data
analytics applications and research projects:
Effective data collection provides the information that's needed to answer
questions, analyze business performance or other outcomes, and predict future
trends, actions and scenarios.
In businesses, data collection happens on multiple levels. IT systems regularly
collect data on customers, employees, sales and other aspects of business
operations when transactions are processed and data is entered. Companies also
conduct surveys and track social media to get feedback from customers. Data
scientists, other analysts and business users then collect relevant data to analyze
from internal systems, plus external data sources if needed. The latter task is the
first step in data preparation, which involves gathering data and preparing it for
use in business intelligence (BI) and analytics applications.
 Data can be collected from one or more sources as needed to provide the
information that's being sought. For example, to analyze sales and the
effectiveness of its marketing campaigns, a retailer might collect customer
data from transaction records, website visits, mobile applications, its
loyalty program and an online survey.
The methods used to collect data vary based on the type of application. Some
involve the use of technology, while others are manual procedures. The following
are some common data collection methods:
 automated data collection functions built into business applications, websites
and mobile apps;
 sensors that collect operational data from industrial equipment, vehicles and
other machinery;
 collection of data from information services providers and other external data
sources;
 tracking social media, discussion forums, reviews sites, blogs and other online
channels;
 surveys, questionnaires and forms, done online, in person or by phone, email or
regular mail;
https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/data-collection-methods
Key steps in the data collection
process
 Identify a business or research issue that needs to be addressed and set goals
for the project.
 Gather data requirements to answer the business question or deliver the
research information.
 Identify the data sets that can provide the desired information.
 Set a plan for collecting the data, including the collection methods that will be
used.
 Collect the available data and begin working to prepare it for analysis.
 Common challenges in data
collection
 Data quality issues. Raw data typically includes errors, inconsistencies and other issues. Ideally,
data collection measures are designed to avoid or minimize such problems. That isn't foolproof in
most cases, though. As a result, collected data usually needs to be put through data profiling to
identify issues and data cleansing to fix them.
 Finding relevant data. With a wide range of systems to navigate, gathering data to analyze can be
a complicated task for data scientists and other users in an organization. The use of data
curation techniques helps make it easier to find and access data. For example, that might
include creating a data catalog and searchable indexes.
 Deciding what data to collect. This is a fundamental issue both for upfront collection of raw data
and when users gather data for analytics applications. Collecting data that isn't needed adds time,
cost and complexity to the process. But leaving out useful data can limit a data set's business value
and affect analytics results.
 Dealing with big data. Big data environments typically include a combination of structured,
unstructured and semistructured data, in large volumes. That makes the initial data collection and
processing stages more complex. In addition, data scientists often need to filter sets of raw data
stored in a data lake for specific analytics applications.
 Low response and other research issues. In research studies, a lack of responses or willing
participants raises questions about the validity of the data that's collected. Other research
challenges include training people to collect the data and creating sufficient quality assurance
Data Analysis & Web Survey Analysis

Data Analysis Process

Data Analysis Process

1.Define the Problem/Questions

2.Data Collection

3.Data Cleaning

4.Analyzing The Data

5.Interpreting The Results

Data Analysis Process

1.Define the Problem/Questions

2.Consumer Behavior
3.Influencing Factors towards Consumer Decision
Making
4.Positioning of a Brand/Product
5.Target Marketing
6.Value added Services
Data Analysis Process

2. Data Collection:
1. First Party Data/Primary Data
Surveys, Interviews, Focused Groups using
Questionnaires,
Schedules, Forms, Observations etc.,
2. Second Party Data/ Secondary Data
Collection from Other Organizations, Reports, Social
Media, Apps,
Website etc.,
Data Analysis Process

3. Data Cleaning
•Removing major errors, duplicates, and outliers—all of which are
inevitable problems when aggregating data from numerous sources.
•Removing unwanted data points—extracting irrelevant observations that
have no bearing on your intended analysis.
•Bringing structure to your data—general ‘housekeeping’, i.e. fixing typos
or layout issues, which will help you map and manipulate your data more
easily.
•Filling in major gaps—as you’re tidying up, you might notice that important
data are missing. Once you’ve identified gaps, you can go about filling them.
Data Analysis Process

4. Analyzing The Data

there are many techniques available. Univariate or bivariate analysis, time-
series analysis, and regression analysis are just a few you might have heard of.
More important than the different types,
Descriptive analysis identifies what has already happened. It is a common first step that
companies carry out before proceeding with deeper explorations.
Diagnostic analytics focuses on understanding why something has happened.
Predictive analysis allows you to identify future trends based on historical data
Prescriptive analysis allows you to make recommendations for the future.
5. Interpreting The Results:
It involves interpreting the outcomes, and presenting them in a
manner that’s digestible for all types of audiences.
There are tons of data visualization tools available, suited to different
experience levels. Popular tools requiring little or no coding skills include Google
Charts, Tableau, Datawrapper, and Infogram. If you’re familiar with Python and
R, there are also many data visualization libraries and packages available. For
instance, check out the Python libraries Plotly, Seaborn, and Matplotlib.
Whichever data visualization tools you use, make sure you polish up your
presentation skills, too. Remember: Visualization is great, but communication is
key!
Web Survey Analysis

Steps involved in Conducting An Online Survey

1. Define Research Goals (Survey Objectives)
2. Define List of Questions
Demographics, Psychographics
Question Types:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/survey-question-
types/#demographic
1. Collect the Responses
2. Analyze the Results
3. Preparation of Report
KPI’s in Web Analytics

KPI stands for key performance indicator, a quantifiable measure of performance

over time for a specific objective. KPIs provide targets for teams to shoot for,
milestones to measure progress, and insights that help people across the
organization make better decisions. From finance and HR to marketing and sales,
key performance indicators help every area of the business move forward at the
strategic level.
Categories of KPIs
Strategic KPIs: ROI, Profit Margin etc.,
Operational KPIs: Revenue, Expenditure, Performance etc.,
Functional KPIs: Department Level, Sales, Marketing,
Production, HR etc.,
 Liquidity Ratios
Types of KPIs Profitability Ratios
Financial Metrics Solvency Ratios
Tuenover Ratios
Website Traffic
Marketing Metrics Social media Traffic
Conversion Rate
Click Through Rates

Sales Metrics

No. of Tickets
Customer Life Time Value
No. of Resolved Tickets
Consumer Metrics Customer Acquisition Cost
Average Resolution Time
Average Sales on New Customers
Average Response Time
Average Conversion Time
Top Customer
Number of Engaged Leads
Customer Satisfaction Rating