<p>The main purpose of web analytics is to optimize the web usage. It does so by measuring, collecting, and analyzing the internet data. There are two forms of web analytics, the off-site web analytics, and the on-site web analytics. Both these forms of internet marketing tools are discussed below.
Off-site web analytics is used to measure the web, regardless of whether or not you own a website, or maintain it. The main focus of off-site web analytics is potential audience of the website, visibility, and the commenting (participation) that is happening on the web.
On-site web analytics has its eyes on the website. The traffic flow of a website is analyzed in depth with this kind of analytics. Pages that get the user to transact online to buy products and services are identified in this internet marketing tool. The top pages and the pages that are not doing so well are pointed out in the analysis. The analysis is done primarily on the business front. The business value of the website is assessed. The results of the analysis are again used to improve the business value of the website.
Web analytics have always existed since web was formed. In the earlier times, the main focus of the web was to assess the web on the technical front. However, today the internet marketing is assessed on a large scale using web analytics. Web analytics has progressed tremendously over the period of time, but still needs to be explored more. More web developers and internet marketers must make use of the web analytic tools, and optimize the web.
All the user interactivity on a web site is stored by the server, into a file, called the log file. The file contains all the details regarding the page requests made by the user. The requests are stored delimited by commas. In the olden days, the websites only contained text pages. Understandably, the log file only contained requests made by the people for those text pages. A thinking programmer thought of making good use of the data contained in the log file. He designed a utility that scanned the data in the file, and developed user understandable reports. This is what lead to the development of 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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September 2nd, 2010 2:37 am