Web Analytics – Must for any website
Analytics is all about deriving useful information from data. In the last decade, analytics has evolved from merely data crunching to powerful decision making platform. The importance of data for websites is even more important in making decisions since most of the information available is either unclear or incomplete. Visitor behavior for a website is as important as a consumer behavior for a brand or product. The idea is to sell better.
Web Analytics as we call it, is the collection, analysis and reporting of the data on web to understand visitor behavior on web usage.
Web Analytics is categorized in the two segments as:
On site Analytics:
This is a measure of visits on your website. The objective of onsite web analytics is to measure the effectiveness of the website in bringing more visitors or buyers to the site and understanding how the performance of the site can be improved. It includes the measurement of the drivers and conversions. The report should provide a comprehensive analysis of what is the behavior of an average visitor on your website.
Some of the questions that it helps you answer are:
What is the percentage of visitors from different locations to your site?
If you have a blogging portal meant for a global audience and 60% of your traffic comes from one country alone, it’s clear indication that your audience is highly skewed and you need to shift your focus from the certain country to the rest of the world.
Which part of the website drives most traffic?
This is one of the most important questions that need to be answered while understanding visitor behavior on your site. Once you have established what is that something your visitor like most in your site, it becomes relatively easy to draw their attention and keep them engaged.
What is the daily visit to your website?
Not only do you get to know useful information about monthly, weekly and daily trends; you also get to understand the daily visits to your site. It’s always better to know which days your visitors are most likely to come to the site. If you know that your daily visits drop significantly on Saturday and Sunday; you can launch a campaign for particularly these two days and maintain your weekly visits.
What brings visits to your site?
This is particularly important from the ROI point of view. If you have placed an ad at certain website, wouldn’t you want to know how many visitors are coming to your site because of the ad? This also helps you plan better. Most of the marketers these days have their marketing strategies revolving around social networking sites. Twitter being the most famous one among marketers these days simply because of the amazing viral effect it has. If 70-80 percent of the traffic to your site comes from a particular social networking site, it’s high time you focus at the marketing channels and try changing this percentage to include search engines and direct traffic as well.
Off site Analytics:
It’s basically the analysis of web data irrespective if the fact that you own a website or not. It measures some common statistics of a website such as audience, visibility etc. It helps provide an insight into the site by providing its potential audience and the overall buzz on the web.
Generally when one refers to web analytics, they mean on site web analytics and for all practical purposes, we stick to the same. There is wide range of tools available to cover both these categories for free as well as paid.
Collection of Website data:
With the high number of web analytics tools, it becomes very easy to track and report the data of your website. The question is how does the data get collected? There are two approaches used for tracking the data:
Logfile Method:
The web server records all the transactions it makes into the logfiles and these logfiles are later analyzed and read to collect all the data.
Page Tagging Method:
Log files posed a lot of practical problems in terms of keeping account of the visits. This gave way to the new method of data collect. This method is more commonly used in web analytics software and tools. This requires Java script to be written on each page of the website. Every time the page is rendered by a web browser, it is notified by these scripts to a third party server.
Both these methods have their advantages and disadvantages. Some companies are also trying to adapt a middle path and are now making programs which can collect data using both logfile method and through page tagging. A hybrid method of this kind would generate more accurate and efficient results and would take care of the drawback of both the methods.
After the collection of data, tools then make use of these data and generate reports in terms of charts and graphs to present the high level as well drill down insights.
To get started on measuring the performance of your site, the first step is to get web analytic software. Let’s have a look at few of the web analytics tool that you could consider:
- Google Analytics
It is one of the most popular and widely used analytics software available for individual site owners. Mostly referred as GA, it provides all the necessary information you would require for your site. It also provides drill down reports and lot of breakdowns at various levels all for free. GA is arguably the best tool to get started on knowing the visitors of your website. The best thing about GA is its simple yet powerful interface. - AWStats
This is great tool for getting better information on the sites referring sites to your website. Pre installed with most of the web hosting companies, AWStats if the best known as a detective tool for bandwidth thieves. Alternatively, one can download it and set it for personal individual servers as well. - eLogic
It provides three level of services for individual and businesses alike. The most basic is the Stat counter which provides minimal reports by tracking one or two pages only. The second one is WebStats BASIC which provides the regular reports on demographics, referring sites etc for your individual needs. For enterprises, it offers Webstats PRO which needs a subscription and provides lot of information with a high number of features. - StatCounter
The site requires some work on the interface and might get ignored for its plain looks. StatCounter is highly recommended for blogs with multiple authors. - W3Counter
It has both a free and paid versions for individual and enterprises respectively. With this tool, one can track upto 5000 page views for ten websites a day. It provides the usual statistics which can be shared with anyone using a widget for the blog. Stats with higher traffic need to sign up for the PRO version. - Webalizer
What makes this tool different is its speed and portability. It’s quite famous with people hosting their own servers. Written in C, the tool doesn’t provide drill downs and lot of breakdowns. What sets this apart is the excellent overview it provides.
These are just few of the tools from the real wide range available. The point is not just to choose the software and thinking you are done. The real job starts only after you have started tracking the data and most of the job is not what the tool provides but what you understand and make out from the reports. As Web analytics guru Avinash Kaushik points out,
“You know what… web analytics tools like Site Catalyst, Yahoo! Web Analytics, WebTrends, and yes even Google Analytics, are mostly glorified data pukers. Each tries to outdo the other in trying to collect ever more data and regurgitating it. For all the math they do, it is astonishing how little intelligence they have, how little actual smarts are applied.”
Having said that, it’s just the start of a journey and you discover only when you start. Every website/organization is different in its approach and you would need to try what suits you the best.
Tags: Analytics, AWStats, eLogic, Google Analytics, StatCounter, W3Counter, Web Analytics, Webalizer
