Web Analytics And A Short History About It

Web analytics is used to optimize the web. With web analytics, the internet data is easily measured, collected, and analyzed. There are two types of web analytics, namely on-site web analytics and off-site web analytics. We intend to discuss both these types in this article.

Off-site web analytics completely concentrates on the web, and does not care if you own a website or maintain it. This type of analytics concentrates on the population of people, visibility, and the activities of people on the web.

On-site web analytics has its eyes on the website. The traffic flow of a website is analyzed in depth with this kind of analytics. Pages that get the user to transact online to buy products and services are identified in the analysis. The top pages and the pages that are not doing so well are pointed out in the analysis. The analysis is done primarily on the business front. The business value of the website is assessed. The results of the analysis are again used to improve the business value of the website.

Web analytics exists since the existence of web. In olden days, the web analytics would only concentrate on the technical analysis of the web. Today, there is much more to the web analytics. Apart from technical analysis, the marketing analysis is done on a huge margin. Although, the web analytics has evolved significantly over the period of time, a lot still needs to be learnt and implemented. The analytic tools must gain more popularity amongst the web developers and web marketers.

All the user interactivity on a website is stored into a log file, by the web server. The log file precisely contains the data about user made requests (hits) delimited with comas. Long ago, websites would only contain pages that displayed pure text. The log files generated would therefore record use requests made for such text pages. One of the intelligent programmers developed a utility that scanned this log file, and generated easy to understand reports. The utility then resulted in the introduction of web analytics and web analytic tools.

Web pages today, do a lot more than just displaying the text. The pages today have animations, graphics, videos, audios and more. Information regarding the user hits on your website, pages that are doing well, pages that are not doing so well etc would be of a great help to you. Such information would help you evaluate the performance of your website. With web analytic tools, this information can be viewed in a very user friendly manner. Graphs and bars are used to display the information, and the same is very easy to understand.

Any web analytic tool would generate reports based on the log records created by the server. If the server fails to create the log file successfully, the web analytic tool will have nothing to display. The web analytic tool would give different results for different websites depending on the traffic flow of the websites. The more the number of user requests, the more is the traffic flow into the website.