Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of web data to understand and optimize web usage.WAA Standards Committee. "Web analytics definitions." Washington DC: Web Analytics Association (2008). Web analytics is not just a process for measuring web traffic but can be used as a tool for business and market research and assess and improve website effectiveness. Web analytics applications can also help companies measure the results of traditional print or broadcast advertising campaigns. It can be used to estimate how traffic to a website changes after launching a new advertising campaign. Web analytics provides information about the number of visitors to a website and the number of page views, or creates user behaviour profiles. It helps gauge traffic and popularity trends, which is useful for market research.
Basic steps of the web analytics process
Most web analytics processes come down to four essential stages or steps,Jansen, B. J. (2009). Understanding user-web interactions via web analytics. Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services, 1(1), 1-102. which are: Collection of data: This stage is the collection of the basic, elementary data. Usually, these data are counts of things. The objective of this stage is to gather the data. Processing of data into metrics: This stage usually takes counts and makes them ratios, although there still may be some counts. The objective of this stage is to take the data and conform it into information, specifically metrics. Developing KPI: This stage focuses on using the ratios (and counts) and infusing them with business strategies, referred to as key performance indicators (KPI). Many times, KPIs deal with conversion aspects, but not always. It depends on the organization. Formulating online strategy: This stage is concerned with the online goals, objectives, and standards for the organization or business. These strategies are usually related to making a profit, saving money, or increasing market share.
Another essential function developed by the analysts for the optimization of the websites is the experiments:
Experiments and testing: A/B testing is a controlled experiment with two variants, in online settings, such as web development. The goal of A/B testing is to identify and suggest changes to web pages that increase or maximize the effect of a statistically tested result of interest.
Each stage impacts or can impact (i.e., drives) the stage preceding or following it. So, sometimes the data that is available for collection impacts the online strategy. Other times, the online strategy affects the data collected.
Web analytics categories There are at least two categories of web analytics, off-site and on-site web analytics. Off-site web analytics refers to web measurement and analysis regardless of whether a person owns or maintains a website. It includes the measurement of a website's potential audience (opportunity), share of voice (visibility), and buzz (comments) that is happening on the Internet as a whole. On-site web analytics, the more common of the two, measures a visitor's behaviour once on a specific website. This includes its drivers and conversions; for example, the degree to which different landing pages are associated with online purchases. On-site web analytics measures the performance of a specific website in a commercial context. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators for performance and is used to improve a website or marketing campaign's audience response. Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics are the most widely used on-site web analytics service; although new tools are emerging that provide additional layers of information, including heat maps and session replay.
In the past, web analytics has been used to refer to on-site visitor measurement. However, this meaning has become blurred, mainly because vendors are producing tools that span both categories. Many different vendors provide on-site web analytics software and services. There are two main technical ways of collecting the data. The first and traditional method, server log file analysis, reads the logfiles in which the web server records file requests by browsers. The second method, page tagging, uses JavaScript embedded in the webpage to make image requests to a third-party analytics-dedicated server, whenever a webpage is rendered by a web browser or, if desired, when a mouse click occurs. Both collect data that can be processed to produce web traffic reports.
On-site web analytics
There are no globally agreed definitions within web analytics as the industry bodies have been trying to agree on definitions that are useful and definitive for some time, that is to say, metrics in tools and products from different companies may have different ways of measuring and counting. As a result, the same metric name may represent the different meaning of data. The main bodies who have had input in this area have been the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau), JICWEBS (The Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards in the UK and Ireland), and The DAA (Digital Analytics Association), formally known as the WAA (Web Analytics Association, US). However, many terms are used in consistent ways from one major analytics tool to another, so the following list, based on those conventions, can be a useful starting point:
Bounce rate - The percentage of visits that are single-page visits and without any other interactions (clicks) on that page. In other words, a single click in a particular session is called a bounce. A high bounce rate can indicate that the content or user experience needs improvement. Click path - the chronological sequence of page views within a visit or session. Analysis of this path provides information about users' session goals and user goals. Hit - A request for a file from the webserver. Available only in log analysis. The number of hits received by a website is frequently cited to assert its popularity, but this number is extremely misleading and dramatically overestimates popularity. A single web page typically consists of multiple (often dozens) discrete files, each of which is counted as a hit as the page is downloaded, so the number of hits is an arbitrary number more reflective of the complexity of individual pages on the website than the website's actual popularity. The total number of visits or page views provides a more realistic and accurate assessment of popularity. Page view (pageview) - A request for a file, or sometimes an event such as a mouse click, that is defined as a page in the setup of the web analytics tool. Usually, the number of page views is more than Visits and Visitors (Unique Visitors). An occurrence of the script being run in page tagging. In log analysis, a single page view may generate multiple hits as all the resources required to view the page (images, .js and .css files) are also requested from the web server. A "refresh" of the same webpage can be counted as another pageview. For example, at 16:07, the user viewed page A, and 2 seconds later, the user clicked the "refresh" button in the browser, and the number of page views of page A then was 2. Visitor/unique visitor/unique user - The uniquely identified client that is generating page views or hits within a defined time (e.g. day, week or month). A uniquely identified client is usually a combination of a machine (one's desktop computer at work for example) and a browser (Firefox on that machine). The identification is usually via a persistent cookie that has been placed on the computer by the site page code. An older method, used in log file analysis, is the unique combination of the computer's IP address and the User-Agent (browser) information provided to the web server by the browser. The "Visitor" is not the same as the human being sitting at the computer at the time of the visit, since an individual human can use different computers or, on the same computer, can use different browsers, and will be seen as a different visitor in each circumstance. Increasingly, but still, somewhat rarely, visitors are uniquely identified by Flash LSO's (Local Shared Objects), which are less susceptible to privacy enforcement. Visit/session - A visit or session is defined as a series of page requests or, in the case of tags, image requests from the same uniquely identified client. Usually, the number of Visits is more than Visitors (Unique Visitors). A unique client is commonly identified by an IP address or a unique ID that is placed in the browser cookie. A visit is considered ended when no requests have been recorded in some number of elapsed minutes. A 30-minute limit ("time out") is used by many analytics tools but can, in some tools (such as Google Analytics and Plausible Analytics), be changed to another number of minutes. Analytics data collectors and analysis tools have no reliable way of knowing if a visitor has looked at other sites between page views; a visit is considered one visit as long as the events (page views, clicks, whatever is being recorded) are 30 minutes or less close together. A visit can consist of a one-page view or thousands. A unique visit session can also be extended if the time between page loads indicates that a visitor has been viewing the pages continuously. Active time/engagement time - Average amount of time that visitors spend interacting with content on a web page, based on mouse moves, clicks, hovers, and scrolls. Unlike session duration and page view duration/time on page, this metric can accurately measure the length of engagement in the final page view, but it is not available in many analytics tools or data collection methods. Average page depth/page views per average session - Page depth is the approximate "size" of an average visit, calculated by dividing the total number of page views by the total number of visits. Average page view duration - Average amount of time that visitors spend on an average page of the site. Click - "refers to a single instance of a user following a hyperlink from one page in a site to another". Dwell time - The duration a user spends viewing a document or other piece of content after clicking a link on a search engine results page (SERP) or interacting with a content feed. In contrast to binary metrics like bounce rate, dwell time serves as a continuous indicator of user engagement and satisfaction. It is often used to mathematically model how effectively a page satisfies a user's intent before they abandon the page or return to the search results. Event - A discrete action or class of actions that occur on a website. A page view is a type of event. Events also encapsulate clicks, form submissions, keypress events, and other client-side user actions. Exit rate/% exit - A statistic applied to an individual page, not a website. The percentage of visits seeing a page where that page is the final page viewed in the visit. Data Segmentation - Web analytics tools allow data segmentation, which means breaking down data into smaller subsets based on criteria such as demographics, location, or behaviour. This provides a deeper understanding of different audience segments. First visit/first session - (also called 'Absolute Unique Visitor' in some tools) A visit from a uniquely identified client that has theoretically not made any previous visits. Since the only way of knowing whether the uniquely identified client has been to the site before is the presence of a persistent cookie or via digital fingerprinting that had been received on a previous visit, the First Visit label is not reliable if the site's cookies have been deleted since their previous visit.