What is Web Analytics?

Web Analytics is a process of measuring and analyzing web traffic that a particular website receives. It is a very useful way of collecting, measuring, analyzing and finally reporting the web traffic information in order to get useful insights, increase visitors, and take effective decisions based on these metrics. For instance, if a company has launched a new landing page that talks about a new service, web analytics will help the business to know how people are responding to that landing page and the new service offered to them. 

 

Benefits of Web Analytics:

Web Analytics has become a full-fledged profession in itself. It help companies find out the no. of total visits, no. of unique visits, page views, average time spent on a site, bounce rate, identifying the sources from where the visitors are coming, browsers from where visitors are coming, keywords people are searching for, performance of online campaigns, which links are popular on your website, and so on. Below is a list of benefits of Web Analytics:

• Website has become ‘bread and butter’ for many individuals and companies today. Its importance is not only limited to online businesses but any kind of business you pick up. Thus, it is extremely crucial to keep your website up-to-date and try to find out the strong and weak areas of your website and work on those.
• Based on the insights received from web analytics, the marketers can plan their next course of action, whether it is related to online campaigns or periodic newsletters or social media marketing, every online marketer needs to understand web analytics.
• Web analytics helps the companies to know which of their products/services are gaining popularity and which are showing lukewarm results. Based on this information, companies can work towards leveraging the popular products and simultaneously boost the lesser known products or just discard them if need arises.
• Knowing which keywords your visitors are searching for, will help the companies to optimize their website/web pages, blog posts/articles and make them SEO rich. SEO rich content leads to more visibility, more leads, customers, revenue and so on.
• Web Analytics helps in optimizing the web traffic in the right direction. One can also do real-time data updates in the website using web analytics tools. Web analytics also provide location-wise information, e.g. from which parts of the world your visitors are coming to your website the most.
• Reporting is one of the biggest advantages of web analytics. Automatic as well as custom reporting can be done using various web analytics tools. These reports are very concise, easy to understand and accurate.

Some Popular Web Analytics Tools:

We have a huge set of web analytical tools available today. Some of them are free and some of them are not. Each of them have their own strengths. Let’s look into some of these tools: 1. Google Analytics: One of the most common analytic tools used by people is Google Analytics. It is free and easy to learn. It generates comprehensive statistics related to no. of total visits, unique visits, page views, bounce rate, keywords used, browser used and so on. Google Analytics also generates very informative reports such as Behavior report, Engagement report, Technology and Mobile Statistics Report, Keyword Reports, Site speed report, Content overview, Custom reports, traffic sources overview, etc. 2. Yahoo Web Analytics: Just like Google analytics, Yahoo web analytics is also free with some advanced features. Yahoo Web analytics is another free tool that will take your analysis to the next level. It gives very detailed and real-time information on campaign tracking, event management, report segmentation, custom email alerts, color-coding, event management, browser-based information, profiling, customization, filtering, visitor behavior, demographic reports and so on. 3. Piwik: Another popular and open source web analytics tool is Piwik. It runs on a PHP/MySQL Webserver. Piwik is used by more than 4,60,000 websites and gets updated very frequently. Features like annotations, e-commerce, transitions, goals, page overlay, scheduled reporting, privacy options, row evolution, log importing, the mobile app makes Piwik a very handy web analytics tool. Piwik Plug-ins makes your analysis tailor-made and comprehensive. 4. Omniture: Omniture SiteCatalyst is a veteran web analytical tool mainly used by big companies. Omniture is based on JavaScript/Image beacon methods to gauge web traffic. Omniture SiteCatalyst provides a very detailed analysis of website traffic and other parameters related to your website. Features like email reporting in Excel, PDF, HTML, Word, scheduling hourly reports, data extract functionality, new user welcome email, new user default dashboards make Omniture very popular. 5. Clicky: Clicky is another web analytics tool which is gaining a lot of popularity. It also provides real-time information regarding your web traffic. Features like link reporting, actions metrics, search data, clicky spy, ranking of keywords make Clicky a very impressive tool. Clicky is also very easy to install especially for Wordpress users. It is clean, easy to use and very efficient. Other popular web analytics tools are Woopra, WebTrends, Spring Metrics, Mint, and so on...

Jobs in Web Analytics:

Here are some of the job openings in Web Analytics which give a very clear view how popular this career in getting... http://www.indeed.com/q-Web-Analytics-jobs.html http://jobsearch.naukri.com/web-analytics-jobs http://www.simplyhired.co.in/a/jobs/list/q-web+analytics http://www.dice.com/job/results?caller=basic&q=web+analytics&x=all&p=

Payscale of Web Analyst:

http://www.indeed.com/salary/Web.analytics.html http://www.totaljobs.com/salary-checker/average-web-analytics-salary Whether you are into marketing or running your own company, sooner or later web analytics will become an integral part of your work. So, get started with web analytics today and learn as much as you can to enhance your career prospects and business opportunities. Web analytics is dynamic, trendy, challenging as well as FUN!