The Advantages of Engaging in Web Analytics

Internet data’s wide availability has sparked a rush amongst corporate agencies to devise methods of best utilizing collection, evaluation, and analysis of said data as it relates to the optimization of the use of the Web as a medium for commerce. This field is known as Web Analytics, and it’s essential to the online success of any company serious about maximizing its presence on the Web.

Web analytics examines traffic trends, but it’s a very complicated field and entails much more than simple headcounts. Facilitated by various programs and software packages, web analytics also functions as a complex business and market research tool, and also to optimize a website’s exposure and effectiveness. Web analytics can also be applied to more traditional advertising and traffic mediums, like print ad campaigns, to measure their effectiveness and success.

Modulation in traffic rates to specific websites detected by web analysis professionals help to indicate changes in trending between the period before a campaign’s launch and the period following it. By providing detailed information and a sector-by-sector breakdown of the number of visitors to a site, the number of page views, and information about those visitors and their search histories, web analytics can help you get a finger on the internet’s pulse.

Web Analytics Technology Solutions

A wide variety of vendors offer analytic services to determine factors like traffic, sales, mail campaign data, e-mail ad response numbers, etc. Two approaches dominate the market. The first is log file analysis, which examines the logfiles Web servers use to keep track of all of their transactions. The second is page tagging, which employs JavaScript or other related means to alert a specially tasked third-party server whenever a page is rendered by a web browser. These two approaches provide valuable data necessary to compile web traffic reports.

Selecting the appropriate technology solution is an initial step on the road to securing regular, reliable data for analytic processing. Assess your website’s strengths, speak to professionals working in the field today, and choose what works best for you.

Where In The World Are Your Customers?

IP geolocation makes tracking a visitor’s location not just possible, but simple. IP geolocation databases, or API, allows software to map a visitor’s location to a specified level (assuming the availability of data). The level of value to market research and to the examination of data produced through web analytics is clear, as the impact of a campaign on a specific location can be evaluated much more readily with specific locational knowledge available.

Off-Site Web Analytics

Off-site Web analytics measures a website’s potential audience, its market visibility, and its acclaim or “buzz.” Off-site analytics, as its name implies, is often (though not always) performed by third-party vendors specializing in the service and not necessarily as an in-house undertaking. Because of its complexity, Web analytics is a commonly outsourced task. It is mainly concerned with incoming traffic and with the website’s presence in the internet as a consolidated whole.

Using off-site Web analytics is a great way to keep an ear to the ground as to the kind of press your website is generating. If you’re trying to evaluate the success of a new tactic, off-site Web analytics can help to provide important information about its success or lack thereof.

On-Site Web Analytics

On-site Web analytics is a more focused field of analysis. It concerns itself primarily with a website’s internal structure, and with the way visitors to the site behave once they’ve arrived and begun to investigate. Factors like which landing pages best facilitate financial transactions or long-term engagement with the website are central to the field of on-site Web analytics.

For assessing your website’s commercial viability and success, on-site Web analytics should be your tool of choice. Data provided by on-site programs is evaluated based on key performance indicators and then, in turn, utilized to make improvements to the design, layout, content, and overall organization of a website or marketing initiative to achieve maximum audience receptivity.

Using Logfile Analysis

Logfile analysis software has been around as an industry practice since the early 90’s (the first serious commercial Log Analysis software was produced and marketed by IT startup IPRO in 1994) when its main utility was to count the number of client requests a web server received. Practical during the era of single HTML file websites, the advent of sites spanning multiple HTML files rendered this method of logfile analysis largely obsolete.

Since the early days of Logfile Analysis, the technology has come a long way. In adapting to web proxies, cookies, dynamic IP addressed, spiders, web caching, crawlers, etc, the software has become much more versatile and informative. While still more prone to fall prey to misinformed data than the related technique of Page Tagging, logfile analysis is a cornerstone of the web analytics industry.

You’re “It”: Page Tagging Solutions

Page Tagging arose as a software development field in the mid to late 1990’s amidst rising concern that logfile analysis was proving inaccurate, defeated by practices like Web caching and the increased demand for a service capable of outsourcing web analytics work. Page tagging, or bugging, consisted initially of a very simple device: the hit counters that were so ubiquitous on early website’s root menus.

By using Javascript (often tiny visible images or, later, invisible ones, and most recently Ajax-based callbacks to the server upon image rendering), page bugs could know exactly how many times a website had been loaded, or “hit.”

Web analytics companies process remotely the data generated by page tagging, using it to generate statistics for the benefit of market analysis professionals. Cookie-ing, which allows tagging software to identify unique visitors, is another innovation of this branch of web analytics. Cookie acceptance is not standardized between various websites and if these inconsistencies are not planned for, difficulties can arise when processing data. Page Tagging is more popular in the web analytics industry, and its trends are well understood.

Comparison: Which Horse to Bet On

Page tagging and logfile analysis programs are easily obtainable. Any company interested in exploring web analytics can provide the relevant software services, and in fact some vendors offer both either separately or in combination. Which one is right for your business? It all depends on how you weight the relative qualities of each approach to data generation and collation.

Logfile

The data provided by logfiles is already there, and on your company’s servers to boot. Your website won’t require the retooling that page tagging requires. In addition to that, it’s also standard-formatted, meaning a switch to a new program won’t cause an upset, and nor will the use of multiple analysis programs simultaneously. Also, logfile analysis provides data about web crawler visits which, while not relevant to traffic data, is useful in terms of Search Engine Optimization(SEO).

Page Tagging

Cached pages are counted by page tagging, but not by logfile analysis. Since cached page views can make up thirty percent or more of a website’s gross views, page tagging’s clear superiority in this area is clear. Data gathered via the “tag” (often JavaScript, Flash, or AJAX in combination with a server-side language) and stored in a database can be manipulated freely as to its representation, freeing up presentation options for the analysis team and their employers both.

In addition, page tagging scripts collect valuable extra information such as a user’s screen size, the price of the goods they purchased, and other pertinent data not included in the query itself. Interaction with flash movies, incomplete forms that were engaged with partially, or MousOver, and other miscellaneous activities are also logged by page tagging, while cookies constitute another obvious advantage, though server configuration can be challenging as noted previously. Page tagging is also more easily accessible by companies without their own Web servers.

An Economic Breakdown

Where page tagging is often provided as a third-party vendor service, logfile analysis is easily accomplishable in-house. Your company’s means, goals, and needs should play a role in determining which of the two approaches to utilize. Conduct a cost-benefit analysis and confer with professionals before making a decision. Hybridized methods involving both techniques are also offered by some vendors, though not often.

Logfile analysis is almost always a single-purchase undertaking. The software is available commercially and through open-source providers, and is relatively simple to learn to use. Although logfile’s in-house low-overhead nature is desirable, the demands created by data storage and archiving can tax your IT department past capacity.

Page tagging almost always requires external servicing, but that carries benefits to go along with its bigger price tag. Your company’s responsibilities toward upkeep of data collection and storage are minimal, and your market data will be gathered and dissected according to your specifications. Ultimately, the decision of which method to employ is up to you, but Web analytics is too important an asset to be overlooked.

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