WEB ANALYTICS

Unit – IV
Web Analytics - Present and Future, Data
Collection - Importance and Options,
Overview of Qualitative Analysis, Business
Analysis, KPI and Planning, Critical
Components of a Successful Web Analytics
Strategy, Web Analytics Fundamentals,
Concepts, Proposals & Reports, Web Data
Analysis.
 What is web analytics?

• Web analytics refers to the process of collecting website

data and then processing, reporting, and analyzing it to
create an online strategy for improving the website
experience.
• Web analytics is important to help you:
– Refine your marketing campaigns
– Understand your website visitors
– Analyze website conversions
– Improve the website user experience
– Boost your search engine ranking
– Understand and optimize referral sources
– Boost online sales
Use a web analytics tool to automatically track key site
performance metrics, like bounce rate, conversion rate,
 What is web analytics?

• Web analytics is the process of analyzing the

behavior of visitors to a website. This involves
tracking, reviewing and reporting data to measure
web activity, including the use of a website and its
components, such as webpages, images and
videos.
• Data collected through web analytics may include
traffic sources, referring sites, page views, paths
taken and conversion rates. The compiled data
often forms a part of customer relationship
management analytics (CRM analytics) to facilitate
and streamline better business decisions.
 Objectives of web analytics

Web analytics enables a business to retain

customers, attract more visitors and increase
the dollar volume each customer spends.
The objective of web analytics is to serve as a
business metric for promoting specific
products to the customers who are most likely
to buy them and to determine which products a
specific customer is most likely to purchase.
This can help improve the ratio of revenue to
marketing costs.
 What are the two main categories of web analytics?

• Off-site web analytics

The term off-site web analytics refers to the practice
of monitoring visitor activity outside of an
organization's website to measure potential audience.
• On-site web analytics
On-site web analytics refers to a narrower focus that
uses analytics to track the activity of visitors to a
specific site to see how the site is performing. The
data gathered is usually more relevant to a site's
owner and can include details on site engagement,
such as what content is most popular.
 Web analytics tools
• Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a web analytics platform that
monitors website traffic, behaviors and conversions. The platform tracks
page views, unique visitors, bounce rates, referral Uniform Resource
Locators, average time on-site, page abandonment, new vs. returning
visitors and demographic data.
• Optimizely. Optimizely is a customer experience and A/B
testing platform that helps businesses test and optimize their online
experiences and marketing efforts, including conversion rate
optimization.
• Kissmetrics. Kissmetrics is a customer analytics platform that gathers
website data and presents it in an easy-to-read format. The platform also
serves as a customer intelligence tool, as it enables businesses to dive
deeper into customer behavior and use this information to enhance their
website and marketing campaigns.
• Crazy Egg. Crazy Egg is a tool that tracks where customers click on a
page. This information can help organizations understand how visitors
interact with content and why they leave the site. The tool tracks
 Common issues with web analytics

• Keeping track of too many metrics

• Data is not always accurate
• Data privacy is at risk
• Data doesn’t tell the whole story
 Present and Future

Today, web analytics are an important part of

how millions of businesses operate.
Businesses of all sizes and stripes rely on
services like Google Analytics to help them
understand consumer wants and optimize
web experiences for them. Data analytics is a
rapidly growing field as well, expected to be
worth $550 billion by 2028.
 Reflection on the future of web analytics

• Data measurement in the browser

• Data for advertising systems
• Personal data is not free.
• Enhanced data
• Consequences of measurement restrictions
• Purchase data and sell data for ad targeting
• It will be expensive
• The data will be hosted on the website domain and
not in the advertising system
• Open-source managed by large companies
 Importance of web analytics

• Access to Accurate Data to Understand the Traffic

• Helps you to Understand Website Audience
– Technology Report
– Behaviour Report
– Demographic Report
• Understand Return on Investment
• Demographic Report
• Improve SEO
• Improve PPC Performance
• Identify Pain Points
• Optimise Conversion Funnel (At Which stage customers are
leaving out)
• Data Reporting
 Components of a Successful Web Analytics Strategy

1.Is your data actionable?

2.Business Goals, KPIs and Conversions
3.Measurement Governance
– Business requirements - documentation including the major KPIs
laid out (BRD)

– Measurement roadmap - (tracking brief) with the tracking logic

explained.

– Metadata roadmap - indicating the logic of the collected custom

attributes

– Tag governance - documentation describing your current TMS system

– Event governance - document listing all collected events, locations and
corresponding attributes
 Components of a Successful Web Analytics Strategy
4.Meaningful Collection and Benchmarks
5.Integrations
– Cross-platform data: aggregate the customer journey data
across web and app properties. You’ll only get meaningful
information if these flows are unified by a user identifier
(deduplicate users)
– Integrations for unsampled data: use BQ and API connectors,
sampled data is useless if you want to be data-driven.
– Integrate the back-end: expand the funnel by mapping the
online data to the offline CRM pipelines, optimize against the
objective that’s further down the pipeline.
– Integrate marketing cost and impression data: add the
impression touchpoints into the online conversion paths for a
more sophisticated attribution, stream marketing cost data into
your web analytics solution.
 Components of a Successful Web Analytics Strategy
6.Regression Testing
7.Test, Analyze, Act and Repeat
HADI cycles - Hypothesis > Action > Data > Insight
• Start the cycle with the hypothesis laid out in an “If.. — then..”
format. Not all of them require testing, and you can choose those
that have the most impact on the business (or a business growth
metric) and require the least effort (cost less).
• Act on the accepted hypothesis, run A/B testing to confirm the lift
in the chosen metric over the original state.
• Collect the data to analyze the delta of the success metrics. If your
technology allows tracking multiple objectives, have several
critical KPIs analyzed.
• Generate insights based on the collected data. If the hypothesis is
confirmed — scale the change, if not — analyze what didn’t go as
expected and why.
 The Fundamentals of Web Analytics

Why do I need web analytics?

In short, web analytics allows you to see how
your website is performing and how people are
acting whilst on your website. What’s important
is what you can do with this knowledge.
Why is this useful?
Analytics is how you find out what to change,
how to change it, and whether your changes are
working. But to get to that stage, you need to
know how to work with the fundamentals.
 The Fundamentals of Web Analytics

How is web traffic measured?

install a web analytics tool on your website
When visitors go to your site, they are loading
webpages up from your webserver to view in
their browser. But how do we monitor this
activity? How do we measure how much your
web pages are viewed and how many people
come to your site?
 The Fundamentals of Web Analytics

Which analytics tool should I choose?

• There’s a lot of choices here. Google Analytics
tends to be the default for most people, because
it is free and can offer an incredible amount of
detail for power users. However, there’s a huge
amount of complex detail that can be confusing
when you’re starting out.
• We originally built GoSquared Analytics to be a
faster, simpler alternative to Google Analytics,
which is easier to use and offers more accurate
real-time data.
 The Fundamentals of Web Analytics

What is a “Pageview”?
A pageview is, as the name suggests, the number of times
your website’s pages have been viewed by people
visiting your site. Whenever someone loads up your page
in their web browser, or refreshes the page, or moves to
another page, a pageview is counted.
• Why is this useful?
• If you are in a scenario, perhaps where your goals or
targets are aligned to traffic volume, then this is, of
course, an important metric for you to be able to prove
yourself or your project. More specifically, knowing
which pages are the most viewed is particularly useful
for websites where you are always adding and updating
content.
 The Fundamentals of Web Analytics

What is a “visitor”?
Measuring the number of “visitors” is an attempt at
measuring how many different individual people
have visited your website. In reality, it is never a
completely accurate measure, but is usually a
reasonable estimate.
• Why is this useful?
• So, this is all to say that the visitor count can give a
reasonable estimation of the number of people
who came to your site, but it can never give you an
exact reading.
 The Fundamentals of Web Analytics

Knock, knock
• By using detailed analytics tools combined with a CRM
(customer relationship manager) or Customer Data Hub tool
you are able to identify in detail who is visiting your site.
• You are able to collate data from different parts of your site
on individual customers and on
segmented groups of customers that we call Smart Groups .
• Why is this useful?
• Your sales team will find a lot of value in this information as
it allows them to
make personalised and tailored approaches to potential cust
omers
. Something that we know customers are expecting more
and more.
 The Fundamentals of Web Analytics

What’s up with bounce rates?

A bounce is when someone comes to your website and
then leaves without visiting any other pages. The
majority of analytics tools will measure this as a
‘bounce’ – no matter how long the visitor stayed on
the page, and even if your website is a single page site.
• Why is this useful?
• When looking at the success of your website the
bounce rate is a great way to look into user
engagement – and this is why applying a time frame is
so important.
 The Fundamentals of Web Analytics
Traffic sources
In the realm of analytics a ‘source’ is anything that
sends people towards your site. By using an
analytics tool and something called a UTM
parameter you are able to see exactly where your
visitors are coming from.
Traffic sources are broadly split into two categories
Organic or Paid.
Organic Traffic Sources- Search
Engines, Backlinks, Social Media
Paid Traffic Sources- Social Media, Advertising
 Overview of Web Analytics Report and Dashboard

• What is the difference between a web analytics

dashboard and a report?
• A dashboard builder is a website analytics tool to help
you build a dashboard that will showcase data and
provide a real-time view of your web analytics
metrics.
• However, a web analytics report is generated to:
• Assist with auditing and reviewing projects over a
certain time frame;
• Identify what has and hasn't worked in the past;
• Use historical data to create optimized and data-driven
strategies.
 5 Elements of A Professional Web Analytics Report

• Sources of Incoming Traffic: This refers to the source or origin of

your website traffic. For instance, people can visit your site through
search engines or email links.
• Page Views: Just as the name suggests, a page view means how
website visitors view your pages and the number of pages the average
individual visits before leaving your site. This metric takes into account
the pattern of page views of a single user.
• Average Time on Page: This refers to website users' average time on a
single page. The longer a visitor stays on your website, the more of an
indication it is that your website is filled with engaging and high-
quality content.
• Bounce Rate: This metric refers to the number of people who visit a
page on your website and leave immediately without interacting further.
• Device usage: No matter how your website is built, it should be
responsive and look great on all devices. So this metric is particularly
important as it gives a breakdown of what type of devices people use to
browse your content.
 Why Build a Web Analytics Dashboard or Report?

• You work for a company that prioritizes visibility

and insight into website performance;
• You are in charge of the performance of a website
that receives a large number of monthly visitors;
• You are tasked with combining web analytics data
with other sales and marketing data to better
understand the performance of your website;
• You are tasked with simplifying critical metrics
monitoring without investigating or utilizing
common tools such as Google Analytics;
 How to Create a Web Analytics Visual Report?

• Identify the top web analytics metrics and key performance

indicators you need to monitor.
• Identify the source of the data you need to pull data from,
such as Google Analytics.
• Determine your preferred choice of presentation of your
dashboard, such as mobile or TV dashboard.
• Determine and assess the dashboard software vendor.
• Pull data from all your data sources into the dashboard.
• Build and design graphical representation and visualization
for your web analytics dashboard.
• Finally, share the web analytics dashboard with your team.
•
 Web Analytics Report Templates

1. Web Traffic Report

• Which device performs better with which traffic (paid
or from organic search);
• What countries bring in which traffic (paid or organic)
and where to double the focus;
• How paid and organic traffic work and compliment
each other.
• Traffic acquisition;
• Unique visitors;
• Total visitors;
• Returning and new visitors;
• Conversion rates.
 Web Analytics Report Templates

2.SEO Overview Report

• Probably the most comprehensive web analytics report
template is the SEO overview report. This is what SEO
specialists and marketers generate when they want to look
at the overall website's SEO performance. This report
shows:
• Bounce rate;
• Conversions;
• Keyword rankings;
• Goal completions successes (Exclusively on Whatagraph);
• CTR.
 Web Analytics Report Templates

3. eCommerce Report
• eCommerce report is a little bit more specific
than the other two mentioned, as it focuses on
the sales part and paid & organic advertising
performance. You want to generate this report to
get all the necessary data about:
• Shopping cart data;
• Best selling products;
• Conversion rate;
• Checkout process.
 Web Analytics Report Templates

4. PPC (Pay per click)Campaigns Report

• The last report to always have handy is the PPC campaigns report. Use
our reporting platform to get the best and the most detailed performance
reports that are also visually appealing. Paid search and paid traffic will
be easily displayed on one page, even though the data source is not one.
Connect Google Ads, Microsoft Ads (aka Bing Ads), Facebook Ads,
Linkedin Ads or any other preferred source, and track key PPC KPIs:
• Conversion rate;
• Clicks;
• Impressions;
• Spent on Ads;
• Overall campaign costs.