Web analytics is the study of how users interact with the websites by recording user related data, which helps in identifying different aspects of user’s behaviour. It is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of web data for the purpose of understanding and optimizing web usage. Web analytics can be used as a tool for business and market research and to assess and improve the effectiveness of a website.
Web analytics essentially involves data collection and data can be collected in two ways, the traditional method is a web server log file analysis and the second method is page tagging, which uses JavaScript embedded in the web page. The collected data is processed to produce web traffic reports. The companies use different web analytics softwares like Google Analytics, Omniture, Coremetrics etc. to find out information about their visitors, including how they interact with the pages in a site, how long they stay on their site, how many people visited their site, how many of those visitors were unique visitors, how they came to the site and what links they clicked on and when they left the site. Web analytics can give a significant competitive advantage to a company; one of the best examples is ‘Amazon’. Amazon uses analytics at every level and scale. Amazon has it’s own analytics tool called ‘Amazon Web Services’, which collects the data about the customers who visit their site, analyzes the data collected to uncover the buying patterns of different customers
The analytics software is the useful tool and great supporter for organization to reduce workload, increase the productivity and create competitive advantages. The analytics software helps organization knows exactly what customers want and their purchasing power, which will assist the company makes best decisions whether big or small every day. What is more, the analytics software works like an effective predictor, which will help organization look forward to the future scenario and make the best plan. Also the software is the key business enabler
And yes, this information is valuable. But these analytics tools alone can’t offer the insights that drive successful business decisions. This level of analysis has to come from a certified “analytics ninja,” a person or team of people that can dig through the haystack to find the insights that move the needle. Even if you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the best analytics products out there, if you don’t have some certified analytics ninjas on your team, you’re just blindly wasting your cash. Essentially, your Web analytics tool is only as powerful as the person using it.
Just like in baseball there are large and small businesses. Businesses have to make decisions, decisions that will help the business in the long run. By using analytics business can measure their performance to know where they stand financially and economically. Numbers are very important in a
Different people define it differently, few like it simple and straight like - Web analytics is the measure of visitor behavior on a Website. Web Analytics Association defines it as "Web Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage."
According to Stephen Hamel(Hamel, 2009), web analytics is defined as “The extensive utilization of quantitative & subjective information (Principally, however not restricted to online information), measurable investigation,
The web is highly dynamic; lots of pages are added, updated and removed everyday and it handle huge set of information hence there is an arrival of many number of problems or issues. Normally, web data is highly dimensional, limited query interfaces, keyword oriented search and limited customization to individual user. Due to this, it is very difficult to find the relevant information from the web which may create new issues. Web mining procedures are classification, clustering and association laws which are used to understand the customer behavior , evaluated a particular website by using traditional data mining parameter. Web mining process is divided into four steps; they are resources finding, data selection and pre-processing, generalization and analysis. Web measurement or web analytics are one of the significant challenged in web mining. The measurement factors are hits, page views, visits or user sessions and find the unique visitor regularly used to measures the user impact of various proposed changes. Large institutions and organizations archived usage data from the web sites. The main problem is that, detecting and/or preventing fraud activities. The web usage mining algorithms are more effective and accurate. But there is a challenge that has to be taken into consideration. Web cleaning is the most significant process but data cleaning becomes difficult when it comes to heterogeneous data. Maintaining accurateness in classifying the
Web analytics is the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting, and analysis of quantitative Internet data to optimize websites and web marketing initiatives.
Web analytics is a set of strategic methodologies implemented to maximize online and e-commerce activities. Web analytics extracts and categorizes qualitative and quantitative data to identify and analyze on-site and off-site patterns and trends. Analytic techniques and requirements vary according to organizational requirements. Web analytics services may be supplemented with related sources, including email marketing response rates, direct mail, sales and website performance data. With the help of Web analytics admin can be able to determine the number of users hit the website and how long they were on the site during the visit.
Business Analytics is a comprehensive method used by businesses deploying sophisticated tools to access past, vast and complex information and then use the acquired data and information to better analyse the organisation and equip its managers with the ability to make a well informed business decision. (http://sydney.edu.au/business/business_analytics Name: Business Analytics Website Name: University of Sydney Year 2015)
Google Analytics is a free tool that provides comprehensive website user statistics giving a window into the behavior of visitors. In turn, this gives the ability to improve the on-site user experience which helps one achieve their business objectives. The services include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, and software. Most of its profits are derived from Ad Words, an online advertising service that places advertising near the list of search results. Google Analytics also helps us to learn what people are looking for and what they like with in- page Analytics and then with that help we can tailor our marketing and site content for maximum impact. It also shows us the full customer picture across ads, videos, social tools, websites, tablets, smart phones and more.
Web Analytics is the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from our designed website and the competition, to drive a continual improvement of the online experience that the users and the potential visitors intend to make use the proposed website. The expected upshot of this proposal is to develop a metric based web analytics and improve the website using key metrics.
Web Analytics tools like Google Analytics provide a myriad of metrics that users can benefit from in order to enhance their business capabilities. These tools enable users to measure a broad range of web data from visitors, bounce rates, page views, conversion rates to dashboards, custom reports, and goals. It can be sometimes confusing to make sense from all the web data obtained. Some users utilize basic features of the web analytics tools and some others utilize complex features to crunch the data based on the specific business requirements. Sometimes users spend superabundant time to analyze complex data that really has not value.
According to Techtarget.com, web analytics is the process of analyzing the behavior of visitors to a website. The use of web analytics is said to enable a business to attract more visitors, retain or attract new customers for goods or services, or to increase the dollar volume each customer spends. Amazon, ebay, and other retail outlets are directly influenced by web analytics. What Amazon does also along with Google is they data mine the visitor, by suggesting goods and services from the searches the visitors make during the course their web surfing. By doing this it allows them to project purchasing behaviors controlled by the companies.
Picking the right analytics tool for a website can be a difficult, time-consuming and an expensive business. Choosing a suitable web analytics tool usually depends on the degree of interaction that a business has with its customers based on their determined businesses strategy. For companies such as Amazon that internet is the main platform to communicate with its customers a strong and reliable web analytics tool is vital. It is not surprising that such a big firm would use an internal comprehensive web analytics tool of its own. On the other hand, for small businesses that are not interacting with their customers solely through the internet or not selling their products online a less sophisticated web analytics tool would be enough.
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.