Web analytics is the process of gathering and analyzing your web content’s data in order to gather meaningful information about how your site is being utilized by your users. There are plenty of Web analytics applications out there, and you probably already know the leading players such as Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, and remote-site services such as Alexa and Compete for Web analytics processes. Web analytics is not just a tool for measuring Web site traffic but can be used as a tool for business research and market research. Web analytics applications can also help companies measure the results of traditional print advertising campaigns. Web analytics helps you to estimate how the traffic to the site changed after the launch of a new advertising campaign. Web analytics provides data on the no of visitors, page views etc to gauge the popularity of the sites which will help to do the market research.
Further, web analytics gives information on competition and market. Comparison with competitors is a fundamental element of business and business research; even innovators need to know how far ahead they are in their market. The Internet seems to offer fertile terrain for capturing accurate marketing statistics on website usage and position relative to other players in a given market to help to perform business research. Indeed, most of us have often heard web statistics from Nielsen//NetRatings, Alexa or comScore cited in the press and elsewhere, which are all part of web analytics.
Practitioners of Search Engine Optimization and web marketing know that web analytics is not just silo analysis of a company’s website: it also entails looking at how a website and its business performance metrics measure up in the overall web ecosystem. This way web analytics helps in business research and market research.
