Web Analytics

What is Web Analytics?
Once you have a website up and running, people start visiting it. Most servers provide a basic mechanism of keeping track of key parameters about your website. This includes the number of visitors, their country of origin, the keywords they used to reach your website and so on.
Web analytics is a term that involves objective analysis of all such data that comes from the website. Simply put, it is the analysis of the statistical data of the website.

The Use of Web Analytics
While search engine optimization ensures that there are more visitors to your website, web analytics provides means to decipher this data and choose the right direction to achieve your website objectives.
Let’s take an example. Suppose a company has an e-commerce website that sales books online. With web analytics in place, the marketing team can figure out which book is most popular, and promote it better. Let’s take this one step further. Suppose the marketing team promotes this book aggressively, but finds that though the number of visitors have increased, the actual books that are sold is abysmally low, it can help them conclude that their pricing strategy is incorrect. Further, analytics can also help you understand how visitors access your website. If the company finds that their website is accessed mostly by mobile devices, they will need to ensure that it is compatible with smart phones / tablets.
In short, web analytics help you to:

• Identify website trends
• Align your SEO strategy with your objectives
• Understand navigational chokepoints
• Get a device wise summary
• Assess the effectiveness of your PPC campaign

Tools of the Trade
There are many web analytics in the market today – some free and some paid. A few of the most popular tools include google analytics, yahoo analytics, Clicky, Crazyegg, etc. Other than these tools, most hosting companies provide some kind of web analytics tools too as part of their hosting service.