There was a time when websites relied on small visitor counters at the bottom of the page to know the exact number of people visiting their website everyday but things have changed since then. From those web counters has risen a term called web analytics, which analyzes the complete activity on a website in a comprehensive manner and through an organized process. Web analytics involves collection, collation and understanding of the statistics and behaviors of internet visitors to a particular website. The entire process is the same; the only changes include the monitoring of activity on different websites like content intensive websites, ezines, e-commerce websites etc.
In e-commerce website, web analytics is used for measuring the various aspects of a website that work in-sync and towards fulfilling a specific business or organizational objective. Now these objectives could be anything related to the website like visitors buying a product, reading the forum, saving product SKU’s in their shopping cart for later or simple signing up for a monthly newsletter. But the most important aspect of web analytics is collection of relevant data. The data can be collected by a web analytics tool in two different ways:
Through the log files that contain information of all the activity on the website and is normally stored on the server. The log files store different degree and type of information like how many visitors came to the website, how many people returned to the website in a single day or week, which website pages were viewed the most number of times, the time in which there was maximum visitor activity, etc.
The second method is called page tagging and it is a more complex process as compared to the previous one. To enable page tagging, you will need to insert a code in JavaScript on each of the website pages that you intend to track. When you insert the code or script, it will send all the analytics or information or data to the server handling analytics and more often than not place a cookie on the user computer.
Now both these methods can effectively measure web analytics for a particular website although the page tagging method is considered to be more accurate. This is also the starting point to understanding consumer and online visitor behavior, which is a far more complex aspect but one that can make or break an online business!
