What is Web Analytics and Why Should You Be Using It
If you have a website of any kind, I am sure that you know what hard work goes in to develop and maintain a good website. It might be a complex e commerce web site or a single page personal website, it takes a lot of planning and a detailed thought process to conceive and design a website, just the way you want it to be. You make it pretty and nice. You put in all that was required to make it a success, loaded it with social media buttons and all. You found out all about keywords and reframed or renewed the content accordingly. All good. But do you actually know how effective is your website and what impact does it have on the visitor. Can you actually gauge the traffic and predict trends for your website? Do you have the answers to the questions like who is visiting your website, what are people looking for in your website and how long do they stay on any given page?
Now that you are looking forward to finding an answer to all those questions, it is good time to tell you to relax, because the answer is web analytics. Web Analytics will help you find out all that is required to improve your website, to enhance its impact and to make the user experience more enriched.
What is Web Analytics?
Web Analytics is a term that implies to the study of the impact that a website has on its users. It is used for understanding and optimizing the web usage by measuring, collecting and analyzing data collected from a website. Giving an idea of the volume of traffic on your web site is just one of the things that you come to know using Web Analytics. It helps you to do some research to find out the ways to improve your website and target desired results or even beyond!
Where did Web Analytics start?
Somewhere around 1993 when Log Files had been created and Web trends was born, website owners had just one criterion to decide the popularity of their website and that was “the number of hits”. More the hits, more the popularity. But this soon lost its importance as being flawless method and as internet evolved people started looking at more complex statistics related to their website and thus came into being Web Analytics. The Web Analytics of today can give you all sorts of information that you require regarding your website using massive amounts of data and using it with complex solutions developed over time. Some of the facts that you can find out are:
- How many unique visitors came on your website
- How did visitors came to know about your website
- How long does a visitor views a page
- what are the keywords and where in your website are they effective
- which areas of the site do not get traffic.
- who likes your website on social media
Today Web Analytics can provide you with such useful information that if you are not using it, you are surely missing out on something really crucial for website improvement.
Should you implement Web Analytics on your own website?
I have very often come across people who say that they do not need Web Analytics as their website is new or because they think that the website is a small one or they find it too complicated to use. It is my humble request to everybody who is not using Web Analytics to use it for the betterment of their website.
I agree, it is no magic wand that will turn the fortune wheel overnight. But today with the help of Web Analytics you can get so much information that all the energy that you have and that you are going to spend to improve your website, can be perfectly channelized to get targeted results in minimum time span. It will speed up the process of positive modification of your website in the right direction. Without it, one might end up just beating around the bush and achieving no results.
Comments and Final Thought
When you created that website of yours, you had a target in your mind. You know for sure that what results you finally want from it. But to achieve them, you need to know everything about your website and an in depth analysis of the traffic on it. Web Analytics will help you do so.