Web Analytics & A Short History About It by Justin Harrison
Web analytics is used to optimize the web. With web analytics the internet data is easily measured collected analyzed. There are two types of web analytics namely on site web analytics off site web analytics. We intend to discuss both these types in this article.
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 commenting participation .
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 services are identified in the analysis. The top pages 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 implemented. The analytic tools must gain more popularity amongst the web developers web marketers.
All the user interactivity on a web site is stored by the server into a file called the log file. The file contains all the details regarding the page requests made by the user. The requests are stored delimited by commas. In the olden days the websites only contained text pages. Understandably the log file only contained requests made by the people for those text pages. A thinking programmer thought of making good use of the data contained in the log file. He designed a utility that scanned the data in the file developed user understandable reports. This is what lead to the development of web analytics.
Web pages today do a lot more than just displaying the text. The pages today have animations graphics videos audios 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 bars are used to display the information the same is very easy to understand.
A web analytic tool is completely dependent on the information contained inside the log file. If the server has not saved the user records ion the file a web analytic tool would fail to display anything. For different websites the web analytic tool would display different results based on the traffic flow of the websites. The more the traffic more are the request records in the log file.
Justin Harrison is an internationally recognised Internet Marketing justinharrison. co. za expert entrepreneur who has built up multiple 7 figure online business consults to some of leading online brands including Amazon BBC AIG many others. Web Analytics & A Short History About It
