What is Web Analytics?

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by Sameer Khan

Web analytics is a process of gathering & measuring data, understanding web site visitor activity and behavior, and optimizing the web marketing process to maximize ROI. If you want exact definition then here is one from Wikipedia – Web analytics is the study of online behavior in order to improve it. 🙂 Short and sweet!

There are ton of different web analytics software packages that convert the raw web data like clicks, hits, page views to meaningful graphs, charts, reports and segments. These reports can be used to achieve business goals.

Web analytics is the missing link in tracking the campaign to its core. It gives the website owners detailed insight on how effective their online and offline marketing campaigns are in convincing their web visitors to take desired action. Web analytics also provides critical information used to make strategic marketing decisions.

Why use web analytics?

There are many reasons to implement web analytics solutions but I would like to focus on three main categories.

1. Improve website usability
2. Increase customer engagement
3. Improve marketing campaigns

Improve website usability

It’s very easy to design and publish website these days. There is not limit to readymade templates, easy to use HTML editors, and cheap designers. The volume of internet audience is also growing rapidly and it’s becoming extremely important to understand your web audience in order to get their attention to your product or service. If your website is able to “solve” their problem quickly, economically, and easily they will become your long term customer.
Web analytics helps you see your web visitor’s site navigation path. You can identify the problems they face in order to achieve their goals. A small change to your website navigation can increase your returns more than 10 times.

Increase customer engagement

Building relationship and customer engagement are the most important part of sales & marketing process. On the web, it’s hard to engage visitors and customers. Your competitors are just one click away from you and that is why Amazon is fighting so hard to keep their One-click shopping patent. To increase customer engagement online you can provide relevant content, frequency update your web content, make your site more accessible through different browsers & devices and improve user experience.

Web analytics allows you to measure customer engagement by measuring the website bounce rate. Bounce rate is a metrics that’s tells you how many of your visitors visited only one page on your site before bailing out. Web analytics also lets you see the browser type, operating system and screen resolution of the visitors. This information allows you to provide improved user experience and provide user friendly web pages.

Improve marketing campaigns


It is extremely important to track your marketing campaigns (both online and offline) if you want to maximize your ROI. Web analytics can be the ultimate solution when it comes to tracking campaigns and tracking your search engine marketing performance. Most web analytics package, with a click of a button, can show you what keywords people type in the search engine to visit your site, your top performing landing pages and ad campaigns, top internal search keywords (hidden opportunities) and where are your site visitors coming from.
Using this marketing intelligence information you can make informed media buy and marketing decisions, optimize your ads, optimize your web search and maximize your return.

Web analytics can become a major contributor to your long term success both online and offline.

Please provide your comments, feedback, or tweets here.

Here is a list of other helpful blog posts –

Bounce rate Calculation in Site Catalyst Omniture

What is Web Analytics?

Is Web Analytics Right for My Small Business?

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Ravi Pathak
15 years ago

Hey Sameer,

Great article with the simplicity.You have laid out very fundamental approaches as to what should web analytics do for the website. Good work . Please keep it up.

Bharathi Baskar.B
Bharathi Baskar.B
9 years ago

Thanks For Your valuable posting, it was very informative.