Web Analytics
Web Analytics
Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimising web usage.(wikipedia)
Web Analytics is not strictly speaking SEO but with out it, knowing the effectiveness of your optimisation and website advertising campaigns would be very difficult to evaluate.
Analytics is a massive area of Web Marketing. We use a number of different software and web based tools to monitor and analysis website performance.
Some of the tools we use include:
- Google Analytics
- WebTrends WebPosition 4
- WebCeo
- Omniture
- SEO PowerSuit
above; Screen Shot of Google Analytics, it's free to use
KPI (key performance indicators)
Their are many KPI's that you should be aware of, the essential basics are
- Does the website work
- Is it fast enough
- What browsers are being used
- What keywords are visitors using
- Where are visitors coming from
- How many users are you getting
- Where are users going on your site
- Time spent on the website and where
- Where are visitors leaving
Log files
It is also important that you have web log files available for download on your websites hosting account. Any good hosting provider will make log files available for download
Traffic log analysis is quite simple and can be an effective way of seeing basic traffic related information. Your web server collects data from web users and you can then read the log files with log analyst software, this software is often provided by your hosting provider and will already be installed on your server.
Data is normally presented in the form of bar charts, graphs and tables.
date or time
browser type
operating system
Referring URLs
Originating countries
Status codes (Successful, Page Not Found, etc.)
Log file data information normally includes: Page requests by: |  |
bar charts, graphs and tables make for easy reading