A Short History Of Web Analytics
Saturday, August 21st, 2010Web analytics helps optimize the web usage. Internet data can be measured, collected, and analyzed using the internet marketing tools. Web analytics can be categorized into two types, namely on-site and off-site web analytics. Let us understand both these types in a little detail.
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).
On-site web analytics on the other hand has everything to do with your website. The focus of this internet marketing tool is to measure the people visiting your website. Evaluation is done on the pages of your website that interest your audience. Also the other aspects of your website that gets the visitors to make purchases are considered. This type of web analytics is used to gauge the performance of your website in a commercial perspective. The resulting data out of the analysis done is used to optimize and improve the commercial value of the website.
Web analytics is known to exist since the origin of web. Initially the main focus of web analytics was on the technical front of the web. However, today, the focus has also shifted to the web marketing. The web analytics has come a long way over the period of years, but has tremendous scope for improvement even today. Al the web developers and internet marketers must use the web analytic tools as much as possible. More usage of the tools will optimize the web more.
As you may know, websites record all the user interactivity in a log file. The log file contains the details about the user requests (hits) separated by a comma. In olden days, websites only contained text pages. These log files therefore only recorded the user requests for such text pages. A smart programmer wanted to draw a report out of this log file. He therefore programmed a utility to automatically scan the log file and report the number of user hits. This utility gave birth to what is called web analytics.
Web pages today, do a lot more than just displaying the text. The pages today have animations, graphics, videos, audios and more. Information regarding the user hits on your website, pages that are doing well, pages that are not doing so well etc would be of a great help to you. Such information would help you evaluate the performance of your website. With web analytic tools, this information can be viewed in a very user friendly manner. Graphs and bars are used to display the information, and the same is very easy to understand.
Any web analytic tool only generates the results based on what is recorded in the log file. Unless the server records the details in the log file, the tool can generate no results at all. Every website has different amounts of traffic flow, and user hits. This will lead to the web analytic tool generating different results for different websites.
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