Web usage is optimized using the web analytics. There are web analytic tools that are used to measure, collect, and analyze the internet data. There are two major two major types of web analytics, namely on-site web analytics, and off-site analytics. Both these types have been discussed in this write up.
Off-site web analytics completely concentrates on the web, and does not care if you own a website or maintain it. This type of analytics concentrates on the population of people, visibility, and the activities of people on the web.
As against off-site web analytics, the on-site web analytics focuses entirely on your website. The main idea here is to assess the traffic flow of your website. All the strong pages of your website that sell products or services are given due consideration. In simple words, the on-site analytics aims at evaluating and improving the performance of your website in terms of its business value. The information that is obtained as a result of on-site analysis is used for the optimization of the website to produce more business.
Web analytics is known to exist since the origin of web. Initially the main focus of web analytics was on the technical front of the web. However, today, the focus has also shifted to the web marketing. The web analytics has come a long way over the period of years, but has tremendous scope for improvement even today. Al the web developers and internet marketers must use the web analytic tools as much as possible. More usage of the tools will optimize the web more.
All the user interactivity on a web site is stored by the server, into a file, called the log file. The file contains all the details regarding the page requests made by the user. The requests are stored delimited by commas. In the olden days, the websites only contained text pages. Understandably, the log file only contained requests made by the people for those text pages. A thinking programmer thought of making good use of the data contained in the log file. He designed a utility that scanned the data in the file, and developed user understandable reports. This is what lead to the development of web analytics.
Web pages today, do a lot more than just displaying the text. The pages today have animations, graphics, videos, audios and more. Information regarding the user hits on your website, pages that are doing well, pages that are not doing so well etc would be of a great help to you. Such information would help you evaluate the performance of your website. With web analytic tools, this information can be viewed in a very user friendly manner. Graphs and bars are used to display the information, and the same is very easy to understand.
Any web analytic tool only generates the results based on what is recorded in the log file. Unless the server records the details in the log file, the tool can generate no results at all. Every website has different amounts of traffic flow, and user hits. This will lead to the web analytic tool generating different results for different websites.
Justin Harrison is an internationally recognised Internet Marketing Expert and entrepreneur who has built up multiple 7 figure online business and consults to some of leading online brands including Amazon, BBC, AIG and many others.