What is Web Analytics?
A webmaster would have come across the term, web analytics the very first time trying to own and run a website. It is a common component of a website that helps you collect various statistics about a website. This has been gaining more and more importance over the last decade, that almost every website that is launched now has its own analytics. In general the main activity would be collecting information about a visitor and the traffic details.
Types of Web Analytics:
Web analytics is broadly classified into two major types;
- On-Site Web Analytics:
This measures the visitor’s details like IP, Pages visited etc of your website. This would ultimately help you in targeting the right audience or in helping you improve the content of the website to target more visitors. The analysis is purely based on the commercial aspect of the website.
- Off-Site Web Analytics:
The Off-Site web analytics gives you the details of internet traffic and web pages that have been of top interest over a period of time; regardless of the fact a person owns a website. This will help new webmaster’s to gain knowledge about internet traffic before stepping into the band wagon of customizing the website for SEO.
Various tools and techniques involved:
Over the years, the general assumption is that web analytics referred to On-Site analytics. But many leading SEO companies have been offering off-site tools for users. Some of the most common tools that are used might include a web server log file, hybrid methods, Geo location of visitors, packet sniffing et al. As the name suggests, a web server log analysis gives the user a log file of the web server’s activity over a period of time. But the accuracy of a web server analysis has always been under the scanner. This lead to the involvement of a technique called the page tagging. Web counters were one of the first modes of website analysis. It kept a hard count of how many times a page was loaded, which indirectly represented the number of people visiting the website. But this was On-Site and based on a common gateway interface or CGI in general.
Geo Location:
This helps in determining from which geographical location a majority of audience were. The user’s IP would be tracked and used to determine from which location of the world the visitor came from. This would ultimately help the webmaster to implement techniques that would include addition of a language that is spoken by a particular set of people who frequent the site and hence targeting more audience.
Problems and Secure Analysis:
The only issue that has always been bothering webmasters and other SEO expert is the issue of cookies. Cookies are just files that hold certain information, so that the webpage need not be entirely loaded. The problem was overcome by the use of secure analysis where no manipulation was possible and each individual session was separately logged and the details were kept separate. The future of SEO is dependent on web analytics as it is on any other factor and determines what effort is needed for a successful SEO.