Understanding Web Analytics
27th January 2010

Analytics is software that generates metrics of a website.   Long before Google Analytics came into picture, most of the webmasters were dependent on Log files while others used web counters.

Why is there so much hype around Web Analytics?

Web Analytics is a powerful tool for measuring the success of your website, your products and services. It helps you in analyzing the website and its real time data initiates continuous improvisation of marketing and optimization efforts. Analytics measures all the possible metrics of a website which help in gaining insight into the visitor behavior on a website.

What Do Web Analytics Tools Measure?

A Web Analytics Tool can measure hundreds of different metrics which can leave a webmaster confused and helpless. Some metrics have more impact on your site than others. The kinds of metrics that matter depend on the type of a website.

For e.g. If your website sells a product, then one set of metric matters will for you, while if your website is content based, a completely different set of metrics matter.

Every Web Analytics measures the following most basic metrics:

• Visitors: Analytics measures the number of people, who visit a website, total unique visitors.
• Map Overlay: A webmaster can measure the number of visitors from each country.
• Traffic Sources: Analytics gives a list of website or keywords from which visitors are coming to the site. Also, one can measure the number of visitors coming directly by entering the url into the browser.
• Content Optimization: Analytics tells you the top content of your website, list of top exit pages, bounce rates and more.
• Marketing Campaign Results: Webmaster can calculate their ROI - Return on Investment. Learn how your marketing campaigns perform in terms of visits, cost, revenue and ROI.

Top 3 Web Analytics Providers:

• Coremetrics Inc.
• Omniture Inc
• Web Trends Inc

Top 3 Free Web Analytics Providers:

• Google Analytics
• Stat Counter
• Clicky