Web analytics is the study of the impact of a website on its users. Web analytics allows tracking and analyzes how people use your websites . It is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. It is often done without the permission or knowledge of the user, by third party cookies which can be shared between different web sites.
Analytics can help companies measure the results of social media advertising campaigns. It helps one to estimate how traffic to a website changes after the launch of a new advertising campaign. Web analytics provides information about the number of visitors to a website and the number of page views. It helps gauge traffic and popularity trends which is useful for market research.
Web Analytics Terms:
Bounce Rate – The instances of visitors entering and leaving the same page.
Cookie – A text file placed on the visitor’s computer while browsing a website. Cookies contain information to track returning visitors.
Crawler – An automated program used primarily by search engines and other services to gather information from the World Wide Web.
Entry Page – The first page viewed by a visitor while browsing through a website.
Exit Page – The last page viewed, rather the page from which the visitor exited.
Hit – An often confused term, hits are any request by the browser to the web server. A web page is a collection of different components like HTML, Images and CSS, each registering as a separate hit with every single request for the page.
Impressions – Each view of an online advertisement is counted as an impression.
Key Performance Indicators – The crucial parameters showing the health of the website and success of marketing strategies.
Keywords – Words and phrases entered in a search engine to reach a result page. Keywords help position websites well to attract potential customers.
Page Views – Each rendering of the web page by the server is counted as a page view.
Return Visitor – A visitor who can be identified with multiple visits, either through cookies or authentication.
Search Analytics – Analyzing search terms and behavior of visitors using the website search engine.
Web Analytics – The process of collection, measurement and analysis of user activity on a website to understand and help achieve the intended objective of the website.
Mobile Analytics – studies the behavior of mobile website visitors in a similar way to traditional web analytics. In a commercial context, mobile web analytics refers to the use of data collected as visitors access a website from a mobile phone. It helps to determine which aspects of the website work best for mobile traffic and which mobile marketing campaigns work best for the business, including mobile advertising, mobile search marketing, text campaigns, and desktop promotion of mobile sites and services.
Social Media analytics – is the practice of gathering data from blogs and social media websites and analyzing that data to make business decisions. The most common use of social media analytics is to mine customer sentiment in order to support marketing and customer service activities.
The first step in a social media analytics initiative is to determine which business goals the data that is gathered and analyzed will benefit. Typical objectives include increasing revenues, reducing customer service costs, getting feedback on products and services and improving public opinion of a particular product or business division.
Once the business goals have been identified, key performance indicators (KPI) for objectively evaluating the data should be defined. For example, customer engagement might be measured by the numbers of followers for a Twitter account and numbers of retweets and mentions of a company’s name.
There are a number of types of software tools for analyzing unstructured date found in tweets and Facebook posts. In addition to to text analysis, many enterprise-level social media tools will harvest and store the data.