Field of Web Analytics

Are you looking for information regarding the field of web analytics? Web analytics is the study of various features of a web site and the visitors to the site. Web analysis involves the process of data collection, analysis and preparing Internet report data for optimizing web usage. The phenomenal use of the Internet has necessitated web analytics. Keeping the data traffic and online activities in mind, the Web Analytics Association (WAA) was formed in 1993 to powerfully promote worldwide business marketers with the support of web analytic professionals and consultants.

Web analytic solutions are of great utility value for executives, marketers and webmasters for their rapidly changing online and offline businesses. So studies in the field of web analytics has helped in developing powerful websites which will help the companies to deliver their products and services in the world market in an effective way. Currently, various web analytics software packages and technologies are available in the industry for the extraction of crucial data and analysis of web data. Thus web analytics provide detailed reports on visitors entering various websites.

For collecting web data, two types of web analytics tools exist — log file analysis and page tagging. Log files will track and record web user behavior such as method of referring, technology use, preferred keywords, page path, geo-segmentation and entry/exit pages. Page tagging method identifies the individual visitor and individual website and gathers valuable information and web statistics from the visitor's web browsers. Page tagging using JavaScript code identifies the right user but it cannot capture data from users whose browsers do not support JavaScript. So now both methods are used in combination for obtaining accurate statistics report.

Each time a server responds to users' requests, the requests are recorded and the server's response is expressed through a status code. Web data is collected from the servers and analyzed, measured, reports created for the purpose of optimizing web infrastructure, advertising campaigns, improving network architecture and so on. In recent times, numerous commercial tools such as ClickTracks, Coremetrics, Google Analytics, IBM SurfAid, NetIQ, SAS and so on are available in the networked world for web analytics.