How do you know how many people visit your website? How do you know what pages they are viewing? How long are the visitors staying on your site? What countries, states, or cities they are coming from? What websites they are coming from?
You can get answers to these and many more questions like that by implementing web analytics solution, which is also called web metrics or web statistics.
Why do you need to know this information? Simply to improve, market and promote your website better. You can also use it to manage what products sell best on your site if you do ecommerce. You can see what pages produce errors so you can correct it. You can see what browsers and operating systems people are using so you can optimize user experience.
There is couple of basic forms of web analytics:
- using web logs
- using a small program call from your pages to a service provider who aggregates the statistics and provides personal user access to them
I have used both methods for different purposes. Generally speaking the second method is more accurate because web logs include lots of unnecessary data which need to be filtered out.
I use Google Analytics on this website. You can see a screen shot of how the web metric data is presented. It works very well and the best part, it is free. You can read about other providers and their comparison on this great comparison list.
A good resource about the web analytics is Web Analytics Association.
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