Web Analytics ? A Short History
Web usage is optimized using the web analytics. There are web analytic tools that are used to measure, collect, and analyze the internet data. There are two major two major types of web analytics, namely on-site web analytics, and off-site analytics. Both these types have been discussed in this write up.
Off-site web analytics has nothing to do with your website. It does not matter whether you own a website or not. It primarily focuses on the web, in terms of its population, visibility, and commenting (participation).
The focus of on-site web analytics is completely on your website. It tries to analyze the number of people visiting your website. The pages of your website that convince the visitors to buy something are identified. The aim of on-site web analysis is to gauge the business value of your website. Once the on-site analysis is carried out, the observed data is then used to optimize the website for better business.
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.
Today?s websites contain pages that do a lot more than displaying text. The web pages are very interactive and attract the user with animations, videos, audios, and so on. As a website owner, you always want to learn about the user interactivity on your website. The web analytic tools give you enough information about the number if hits made by users, and the most frequently visited pages. The information is displayed in an easy to understand manner, with graphs and bars.
Any web analytic tool only generates the results based on what is recorded in the log file. Unless the server records the details in the log file, the tool can generate no results at all. Every website has different amounts of traffic flow, and user hits. This will lead to the web analytic tool generating different results for different websites.
Justin Harrison is an internationally recognised Internet Marketing Expert and Entrepreneur who has built up multiple 7 figure online business and consults to some of leading online brands including Amazon, BBC, AIG and many others.