Web Analytics Tutorial

Lesson 1 – What is Web Analytics?

IN THIS LESSON

Introduction

Basic Units of Measure

Bytes

Advanced Units of Measure

Users

Unique hosts

Visits or sessions

Visit tracking with cookies

Further Study

Introduction

Recently I was planning a vacation and looking at various airline destinations at one of the major online ticketing sites. After trying two or three different options, the site asked me to login or register. I found this frustrating because it disturbed my process of vacation planning. It was also requesting personal information for a process that I wanted to assume was relatively anonymous. So I took time out to send the site designers an email with my thoughts: the other ticketing sites do not require registration for browsing, and I was tempted to use those sites to avoid the hassle of registering. I went to look for tickets again a few days later and found that I no longer had to register to search more than three times.

Most sites are not lucky enough to get explicit user feedback. The nature of the web makes it easy for visitors to find you, but also for them to find similar sites. If they get frustrated or cannot seem to make your site work the way they want to, get confused or feel their privacy is being invaded, they will likely move on to another site.

The web allows you to publish your business or content to a very large audience, very easily. But that does not change the need to make sure you understand your audience. By connecting with your visitors, you make them feel more comfortable. If your site “thinks” the way they do, it becomes natural and they will recommend it to friends. Web analytics can give you the power to know how your visitors use your site, to know how they react to your site (or changes on your site) and to improve the quality of the site. The better your visitors feel about using your site, the better your bottom line will be.

If your site is commerce-related and you have competition, you can be sure that your competitors are also using web analytics (or some related marketing techniques) to gain more customers. In particular, you can use web analytics to gain not just more customers, but more valuable customers.

In addition to design (or behavior) analysis, web analytics can be used to diagnose server or site problems, and measure the effectiveness of marketing and advertising campaigns. In the next 12 lessons we will discuss the various types of data that you can find in your web logs and we will also teach you how to better assess the quality of your site.