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The History Of Web Analytics

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Web analytics is how companies and firms are using technologies to track the behavior of visitors to websites designed to show information, sell products and services, and present a superior brand that meets their targeted customers’ needs. Companies have been unhappy with their marketing functions for almost as long as they have been in existence, because their ability to track the success of their marketing efforts has always been insufficient, or even better, non-existent. The emergence of the World Wide Web and the Internet and everything that is now done online digitally has changed all that, because digital tracking was now possible. But with all the digital tracking and the newfound ability to track a company’s return on …show more content…

So for frequent users, the companies would ensure their sites loaded as quickly as possible by storing certain parts of websites on the users’ own computers, and only needing to send new updates directly from the company. Later this delivery method was supplemented by companies deciding to store portions if not entire web pages much closer to their users, sometimes in data centers the companies themselves owned, and sometimes in data center companies chosen specifically for Internet speed and web server availability they had.
While digital tracking has made web analytics explode since the turn of the century, the metrics used to measure the success, failure and everything in between for web analytics have evolved tremendously. Initially, businesses were happy enough to get web “hits”, until they realized that a web server showing a document, image, or other file was a hit, which in turn meant that if one user went to one web page, often there would still be multiple web hits measured. This significantly devalued hits as a key performance indicator (KPI.) So then emerged the page view as the KPI. In effect, the page view is a condensed version of the hit; so while it only reduced the multiple counts during a single user’s page view to a manageable level, it allowed better insight into other aspects of a user’s time on a web page, including page views per visit and time spent on web pages. And

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