Web Analytics

(One of my published articles. Anyone interested in referring to this is most welcome although a citation or a link back would be greatly appreciated)

One of my favourite books on marketing is “End of Marketing as We Know It” by Sergio Zyman, the legendary, former Chief Marketing Officer of the Coca Cola Company. The basic tenet of this book was that Marketing was more science than art. No more was marketing all about that genius creative or ad campaign. Marketing, instead, as he viewed it was all about delivering results. How many units of coke did that Ad sell? Did the sales grow after launching that campaign? Did we profit from the direct mail campaign? Marketing was less Ad agency voodoo and more about measurable outcomes.

Yes, I’ll repeat it again “Measurable Outcomes”. As a young marketer, learning the ropes, this book opened my eyes to the raison d’etre for any marketer – Metrics. Marketing exists not to create beautiful Ad campaigns or killer direct mails. The sole duty of marketing is to generate demand. I truly believe that for any marketing activity to be truly successful, it should necessarily be metrics driven and ultimately be tied to the goal of the company. The outcome must be ..(don’t kill me for saying this) measured. So it is with great glee that I write about Web Analytics. For a data driven person like me, Web Analytics and Web analytics tools are like panacea to my soul.

What is Web Analytics?

Web Analytics is basically the study of traffic to a particular website – where it’s coming from and its subsequent behaviour on the website. Wikipedia defines Web Analytics as “the study of the behaviour of website visitors. In a commercial context, web analytics especially refers to the use of data collected from a web site to determine which aspects of the website work towards the business objectives; for example, which Landing Pages encourage people to make a purchase”

Web Analytics provides insights on a range of traffic related questions like:

1. How many people are visiting your site?
2. Where are they coming from?
3. What is their activity on the site?
4. Which page are they viewing most often?
5. Which page are they dropping off from?
6. What keywords did they use to visit the page?

The analysis of website traffic began in the early 90’s through the scrutiny of Logfiles. Logfiles are files maintained by web servers, consisting of all transactions that take place on a website. It wasn’t long before, these file were being used to provide insight on the amount activity that was taking place on a website.

In the early years, Web Analytics primarily consisted of counting the number of “Hits” or the number of requests made to the web server. This method was fairly representational of the site’s popularity as web pages in those days were pretty basic and consisted of a single HTML file with no images, animations, videos or downloads

As the late 1990s saw the emergence of Search Engines which brought with them their spiders and their bots, it became more and more difficult to identify unique human visitors through Logfile analysis alone. The uses of Web Caches also posed a problem as subsequent visits of a person to a website could not be tracked through Logfiles

In order to address issues thrown up by Logfile analysis, a new method called page tagging evolved, which used JavaScript on each page to notify a third-party server when a page is rendered by a web browser. This not only solved the issue of caching and search engine bots but also enabled web analytics to be outsourced to a web analytics company as Page tagging could now be performed by companies who did not run their own web servers.

Importance of Web Analytics

Web Analytics is not about merely analyzing website data. It’s about understanding what drives people to the site and what features effect their subsequent activity on the site. Most importantly, from a business perspective, Web Analytics gives you an insight on if your site is meeting its intended objective.

As we mentioned earlier, put simply, web analytics helps us measure how many people visited a site, how they got there and what they did subsequently. Measuring and monitoring these data parameters helps us understand the individual user behaviour. The valuable insights provided by this data helps us analyze how people came to a particular site, what keyword or phrases they used to get there– whether these keywords are relevant or not, what they did subsequently on landing, what were the most frequently visited pages, what were the least frequently visited pages, which page saw a high drop off and most importantly, if the user ultimately did what the site wanted him to do. For example if it’s an E-commerce site, did all the user activity ultimately lead to a transaction? Or if it’s a social networking site did the user creat a new profile?

Web Analytics provides us the data to makes tweaks and enhance the ROI or conversions from a website. To quantify the advantages in simplistic terms, Web Analytics helps improve :


1. A site’s Search engine Rankings so that one is able to attract more & relevant traffic
2. A site’s usability and helps it become more user friendly so that people are able to navigate better
3. Conversions or sales transactions – What ever is the ultimate objective of the site

Basic Metrics

Ok, so now we know what Web Analytics is, we have gone into the history and we even know why it’s important, so great, how do we start off? Analyzing a whole bunch of website data can be clearly overwhelming, more so if one is not familiar with the basic web metrics and their definitions. Most web analytics softwares offer the following web metrics that one can track to start off with.

Hits: This metric is frequently cited to indicate site popularity but infact very misleading. In most web analytics discussions a ‘hit’ is defined as a single request for any item on your website. This can include images, animations, audio, video, downloads, PDF or Word documents or anything else that you allow visitors to access. When a web browser loads a page, it also loads all the above components referenced by that page. Thus, a single page load can result in many hits.

Visits: This is most basic of all web metrics and indicates the number of visits (unique and otherwise) a site receives. It provides a quick indicator of how effectively a site is being promoted.

Pageviews: This is the total number of pages viewed on a site and is a general measure of how much a site is used. This report also provides an insight on what pages are being viewed the most and hence give an idea on what’s working on a site and what’s not.

Pages/Visit: Average Pageviews is a good way of measuring visit quality. A high Average Pageviews number suggests that visitors are interacting extensively with a site. A high Average Pageviews results from one or both of the following factors: (1) Appropriately targeted traffic (i.e. visitors who are interested in what a site offers and (2) High quality content effectively presented on the site. Conversely, a low Average Pageviews indicates that the traffic coming to the site has not been appropriately targeted to what the site offers or that the site does not deliver what was promised to the visitor.

Bounce Rate: Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left the site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren't relevant to the site’s visitors.

Avg. Time on Site: Time on Site is one way of measuring visit quality. If visitors spend a long time visiting your site, they may be interacting extensively with it. However, Time on Site can be misleading because visitors often leave browser windows open when they are not actually viewing or using a site.

% New Visits: This report lets you analyze the amount of new visitors or return visitors that a site is attracting. A high number of new visitors suggests that one is successful at driving traffic to a site while a high number of return visitors suggests that the site content is engaging enough for visitors to come back.

Traffic Sources: This report gives an insight on where are all the traffic is coming from - If it is Direct traffic or from a referral site or if it’s coming from search engine. This allows one to invest marketing resources on the right channel

Search phrases & keywords: This report gives a detailed list on what keywords or phrases are driving search engine traffic to a website. It helps us understand if the traffic that the site is getting is relevant or not

There are many metrics that are offered by numerous web analytics softwares in the market. Most metrics also offer fascinating insights on the working of the website but the key to understanding metrics is to hone in only on those metrics that have a direct relevance on the objective of your website. For example, bounce rate is a misleading metric for a blog because most people exit a blog after reading the latest post. The ideal metric for a blog would be the number of visits.

Tools & Resources

There are a lot of web analytics softwares in the market and most of them differ in the way they measure metrics. But if one is just starting out with web analytics and if one has some time to play around with data, I would personally recommend, Google’s Web Analytics Software. It is free and can be easily integrated with Google Adwords Campaign and hence helps one get an insight on how ones keywords are performing. It is also easy to integrate Google Analytics with one’s website and just requires one to add a couple of lines of tracking code to the website’s HTML code

Bottom line

Ultimately, what web analytics gives you is the data. What makes web analytics effective is the inference drawn from them and that can only come from within the organization.

An organization I once worked with had an elaborate user profile page that was used internally to capture web based leads. Upon employing web analytics, it was found that this lengthy profile page had an astounding drop-off rate of 85%. This led to a drastic shortening of the page and helped the organization get more people to fill the page and ultimately more leads

Web analytics data only provides insights on what is happening on the site currently. It is up to us on how we use this data to improve the website and ultimately the ROI or the bottom line