A Brief History About Web Analytics

May 15th, 2010 by Justin Harrison Leave a reply »

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).

As against off-site web analytics, the on-site web analytics focuses entirely on your website. The main idea here is to assess the traffic flow of your website. All the strong pages of your website that sell products or services are given due consideration. In simple words, the on-site analytics aims at evaluating and improving the performance of your website in terms of its business value. The information that is obtained as a result of on-site analysis is used for the optimization of the website to produce more 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.

The user actions on a website are always recorded into a log file, by the web server. The records describe the page requests made by the users, delimited by commas. In past, the log files contained only text page requests, as the websites only contained pages that displayed just the text. An innovative programmer thought of using the data in the log file to assess the website performance. He therefore developed a utility that scanned the log file and returned meaningful and easy to understand reports. This was the beginning of web analytics.

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.

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 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.

Be Sociable, Share!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Powered by Yahoo! Answers