Web Analytics
Q-1 Define Web Analytics. Explain the process of web analytics.
Ans- Web analytics is the gathering, synthesizing, and analysis of website data with the goal of improving the website user experience. It’s a practice that’s useful for managing and optimizing websites, web applications, or other web products.
It’s highly data-driven and assists in making high-quality website decisions. User can also get ideas on how to improve their product and drive business growth from web analytics. Product managers, data scientists, UX designers and others can use web analytics if they’re looking to enhance their website or product experience to meet customer needs.
Process of Web Analytics-
The process of web analytics involves:
· Setting business goals: Defining the key metrics that will determine the success of your business and website
· Collecting data: Gathering information, statistics, and data on website visitors using analytics tools
· Processing data: Converting the raw data you’ve gathered into meaningful ratios, KPIs, and other information that tell a story
· Reporting data: Displaying the processed data in an easy-to-read format
· Developing an online strategy: Creating a plan to optimize the website experience to meet business goals
· Experimenting: Doing A/B tests to determine the best way to optimize website performance
Q-2 Define building block, visit characterization, content characterization and conversion metrics.
Ans- Building Blocks – Building blocks are mostly fall under Dimensions, these are the terms used when we talk about a website page with which a user/visitor interact
Building Blocks – Entry page / Landing pages / Exit Pages /Error Page / Referrer Page
Visit Characterization –Visit characterization are mostly counts about a visit by a user
Visitor Characterization – Hit / Page views / Visits or sessions / New, Unique, Return or repeat visitor / singletons / visit referrer – internal, external, search
Content Characterization- Content characterizations are counts or ratios about the quality of page attributes / information / resources and the action taken by the visitor on the page
Content Characterization – Bounce rate / visit duration / page views per visit
Conversion Metrics: Conversion metrics are counts or ratios about stats with respect to visitors getting converted to customers
Conversion metrics – goal setting / click through rate (CTR) / conversion – registrations, downloads, form fills, purchases
Q-3 What are the main categories of Web analytics?
Ans- The two main categories of web analytics are off-site web analytics and on-site 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. Off-site web analytics provides an industry wide analysis that gives insight into how a business is performing in comparison to competitors. It refers to the type of analytics that focuses on data collected from across the web, such as social media, search engines and forums.
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. Two technological approaches to on-site web analytics include log file analysis and page tagging.
Log file analysis, also known as log management, is the process of analyzing data gathered from log files to monitor, troubleshoot and report on the performance of a website. Log files hold records of virtually every action taken on a network server, such as a web server, email server, database server or file server.
Page tagging is the process of adding snippets of code into a website's HyperText Markup Language code using a tag management system to track website visitors and their interactions across the website. These snippets of code are called tags. When businesses add these tags to a website, they can be used to track any number of metrics, such as the number of pages viewed, the number of unique visitors and the number of specific products viewed.
Q-4 Explain some web analytics platforms.
Ans- Some examples of web analytics platform include the following:
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. Kiss metrics 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.
CrazyEgg. 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 visitors, heatmaps and user session recordings
Q-5 Explain the evolution and need of web analytics.
Ans- With all the newness and excitement, it may come as a surprise to know that web analytics is almost as old as the internet itself. The first example of web analytics was hit counters, or simple code that kept track of how often a page is visited. These numbers are easy to understand without expertise. Next log analysis came, which helped individuals interpret server logs. Log analysis could identify traffic sources and new inbound links.
Website complexity increased along with log analysis. As sites added images, audio, and video, browsers had to make HTTP requests per page visit, which got redundant. Caching, or temporarily storing a file in the system to avoid multiple HTTP requests, didn’t show up on the server log. The solution to this problem was tag-based tracking, which collected information on more than just hits. Said additional information allowed analytics to move into the field of marketing.
At the turn of the century, large companies struggled to make use of all the marketing data their website offered. They would take up to 24 hours to process it all. That is, until a company called Urchin arrived on the scene and processed it in as little as 15 minutes. Urchin grew in size and client base until Google acquired them in 2005. And so Google Analytics was born.
Google’s most expansive web analytics product was Universal Analytics, launched in 2012. Capable of offline behavior monitoring and tracking users across multiple platforms and devices, Universal Analytics fueled part of the growing concern for consumer’s digital privacy. Governments like the European Union acted, passing the General Data Protection Regulation in 2016. In response, Google came out with Google Analytics 4 in 2020, which combines depth of insight with compliance to the GDPR’s standards.
Q-6 Explain the advantages and limitations of web analytics.
Ans- Advantages of web analytics are
1) Measure online traffic-
The web analytics will divide all the sources of traffic and website conversions in an easily understandable way. Analyzing the data provided, a company will recognize which activities produce the most profit to the bottom line.
2) Tracking Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate in analytics means that a user who has visited the website leaves without interacting with it. When a high bounce rate occurs on a website, it’s hard to expect a website to produce quality leads, sales, or any other conversions related to business.
A high bounce rate might tell us the following:
· The users didn’t feel that content was for them, or it didn’t match well with the search query.
· A weak user experience overall
3) Optimizing and Tracking of Marketing Campaigns
Unique and particular links that can be traced established for various marketing campaigns, whether they are online or offline. Tracking these unique links will provide you with details on how these marketing campaigns have been received by the users and if it’s been profitable.
By tracking everything possible, you will find potentially highly returning campaigns to invest more and cancel campaigns that are performing poorly.
Unique links also allow tracking offline-to-online campaigns. For example, a business could share it’s a unique link in an event or utilize the link in mailing campaigns which effects could be tracked online.
4) Finding the Right Target Audience and its Capitalization
In marketing, it’s crucial to find the right target audience for your products and services. An accurate target group will improve the profitability of marketing campaigns and leave a positive mark on the company itself.
Web analytics will provide companies with information to create and find the right target audiences.
Finding the audience will help companies create marketing materials that leave a positive feeling to their customers.
The right marketing campaigns to the right audiences will increase sales, conversions, and make a website better
5) Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Only through the utilization of web analytics websites can improve their conversion optimizations. The goal of CRO is to make users do tasks assigned to them.
The conversion rate is calculated when received goals are divided by the number of users. There are many conversions a website should measure, and every business should measure those that are most important to their business.
6) New Creative Ideas
Analyzing data gives a unique opportunity to find new perspectives within your business model. Tracking your data will provide you with more insights about trends and customer experiences within your business. These opportunities could potentially be seeds for growth internally and organically.
For example, a newly written article that brings more organic traffic compared to the rest of the site. Knowing this early on could shift your marketing efforts into a more profitable path
Limitations of Web analytics are
1) Data misuse- Some data analytics tools rely on you giving up information about yourself, your company and your visitors, meaning they no longer remain confidential to you.
2) Unwanted information
There are two sources of unwanted information which will lead to over-reporting:
Internal traffic - by default data provided through GCC analytics includes traffic from internal users. This is not necessarily unwanted but if you are interested in the traffic to your pages by the general public, you will need to make arrangements to use the "External Traffic only" view.
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