What is Web Analytics?

Introduction
• A business needs it to collect the data about ongoing activities, results, and effects of policies and strategies,
etc., when it comes to online marketing. Web analytics comes to help to do this.
• Web analytics is used to determine the performance of investments assigned in terms of online advertises,
customers, and business profitability. Web analytics plays an important role in calculating ROI of your
business.
• Web Analytics is a technique that you can employ to collect, measure, report, and analyze your website data.
It is normally carried out to analyze the performance of a website and optimize its web usage.
• Web Analytics is an indispensable technique for all those people who run their business online
• Web Analytics is the methodological study of online/offline patterns and trends. It is a technique that you
can employ to collect, measure, report, and analyze your website data. It is normally carried out to analyze
the performance of a website and optimize its web usage.
• We use web analytics to track key metrics and analyze visitors’ activity and traffic flow. It is a tactical
approach to collect data and generate reports.
• Web analytics is the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting, and analysis of quantitative
Internet data to optimize websites and web marketing initiatives.
Learning Objectives.
By the end of the tutorial the student should be able to:
i. Define Web analytics
ii. Differentiate between quantitative and qualitative data
iii. Describe the importance of web analytics
Points to note about that definition
• Measuring quantitative and qualitative data
• Continuously improving your website
• Aligning your measurement strategy with your business strategy
Data
Quantitative and Qualitative Data
• Organizations need many different types of data to understand the
performance of their website. Tools like Google Analytics, Omniture,
WebTrends, and Yahoo! Web Analytics generate quantitative, or
clickstream, data. This data identifies where website traffic comes
from and what it does on the site. It more or less tells what happened
on a website.
• While clickstream data is critical, you must collect more than
quantitative data—you must also collect qualitative data. While
quantitative data describes what happens on your website, qualitative
describes why it happens. Qualitative data comes from different
sources, like user interviews and usability tests. But the easiest way to
get qualitative data is through surveys. Asking website visitors simple
questions like the ones below can lead to a greater understanding of
what visitors want and whether you’re making it easy for them:
• Why did you come here today?
• Were you able to do what you wanted to do?
• If not, why?
• There are a number of free qualitative data tools, like 4Q and Kampyle,
that are easy to implement and provide valuable feedback from your
website visitors. It’s easier to implement these tools than a clickstream
data tool like Google Analytics.
• Besides clickstream data from your own website, its important to look at
data from your competitors’ websites. We live in an amazing age in
which competitive data is freely available to everyone.
• Competitive data provides valuable context for your own data. It
describes your performance as compared to that of your competitors.
Compete.com and Google Trends can help you identify simple things like
whether your competitors are getting more traffic than you
Importance of Web Analytics
We need Web Analytics to assess the success rate of a website and its
associated business. Using Web Analytics, we can −
• Assess web content problems so that they can be rectified
• Have a clear perspective of website trends
• Monitor web traffic and user flow
• Demonstrate goals acquisition
• Figure out potential keywords
• Identify segments for improvement
• Find out referring sources
The purpose of web analytics
• Web analytics is the activity that will provide information about different
aspects of a websites, as well as help you answer some of the questions
related to the traffic and overall performance.
• To give you a very basic summation of what kind of information a web analyst
deals with, here are a few indicators or signals of a website that are
meaningful and significant for web analytics:
• What is the gross quantity of visitors on a website or traffic quantum
• What is the number of unique visitors or visitors who are new
• The route involved in bringing different categories of traffic to the website.
E.g., how many arrive through search engine results, how many get to the
website through online marketing?
The purpose of web analytics-cont’
• What terms are trending on the search facility on the website, what are users
searching for and in what quantity?
• What category of users searches for particular keywords or search terms?
• What is the average, minimum and maximum time being spent on the website by
users?
• How many users are going beyond the main page, to deeper links?
• What are the links attracting the most second clicks beyond the homepage?
• What is the bounce rate? How many users arrive at the homepage and leave website?
• Note that all the above questions require monitoring, collection, classification,
interpretation and finally, analysis of vast sums and types of data that is usually raw
statistics, which need to be brought into a meaningful context