Web analytics is the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting, and analysis of quantitative Internet data to optimize websites and web marketing initiatives. Web analytics are important to any web marketing strategy to ensure performance and help instruct future plans – and today, there are a large number of different web analytics providers to suit the needs of smaller or larger corporations.
In the beginning, server error logs provided the first details about number of hits, and these often included other information that could help identify where the hit came from such as filename, time, referrer, IP address, browser identifier, operating system, and so on. Naturally, as the non-technical crowd became interested in browsing these logs, scripts were written to parse the data from the server error logs and these compiled the first metrics of web analytics.
In 1995 Analog is released, being one of the first log file analysis programs that are available on the Web. Programs like these would help make the information accessible to those in marketing. Around the same time, Web counters begin appearing on web pages everywhere, a badge to attest to the popularity of the website.
There were some flaws to using log files, however, and increasingly javascript came to be used to track data about users viewing websites. These problems included: page caching by ISP, here the first view of the page would show in the log files but future visits would not be tracked as the page would be cached already; unique visitors were difficult to track as dynamic and shared IP addresses became more common; and search robots, as they became more sophisticated, were difficult to differentiate than from normal users and often were included in the metrics. So javascript, embedded on every page, would help solve some of these problems.
Site overlays became available soon enough, and this would show how the user was interacting with a page by showing click density. Google transformed the web analytics world when it introduced free web analytics in 2006 for anyone and everyone. This was first class software that Google had obtained when purchasing Urchin and this made web analytics possible for all webmasters.
Heat maps are another exciting development, these showinggreat details about where the user focus lies on a page – where the mouse is moving and where the clicks are centered. Here a hot zone might be a good opportunity for the most important information to be presented to the website users.
Web analytics is definitely still in its infancy. I look forward to software that will capture the expressions on the face of a visitor as they navigate through the site.
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Very good concept, I like how you convey the message.