Web analytics

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Internet marketing

Display advertising
Email marketing
E-mail marketing software
Interactive advertising
Social media optimization
Web analytics
Cost per impression

Affiliate marketing

Cost per action
Contextual advertising
Revenue sharing

Search engine marketing

Search engine optimization
Pay per click advertising
Paid inclusion
Search analytics

Mobile advertising

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Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.

Web analytics is not just a tool for measuring website 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. It helps one to estimate how traffic to a website changes after the launch of a new advertising campaign. Web analytics provides information about the number of visitors to a website and the number of page views. It helps gauge traffic and popularity trends which is useful for market research.

There are two categories of web analytics; off-site and on-site web analytics.

Off-site web analytics refers to web measurement and analysis regardless of whether you own or maintain a website. It includes the measurement of a website's potential audience (opportunity), share of voice (visibility), and buzz (comments) that is happening on the Internet as a whole.

On-site web analytics measure a visitor's journey once on your website. This includes its drivers and conversions; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase. On-site web analytics measures the performance of your website in a commercial context. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators for performance, and used to improve a web site or marketing campaign's audience response.

Historically, web analytics has referred to on-site visitor measurement. However in recent years this has blurred, mainly because vendors are producing tools that span both categories.

The remainder of this article concerns on-site web analytics.

1 On-site web analytics technologies
- 1.1 Web server logfile analysis
- 1.2 Page tagging
- 1.3 Logfile analysis vs page tagging
  - 1.3.1 Advantages of logfile analysis
  - 1.3.2 Advantages of page tagging
  - 1.3.3 Economic factors
- 1.4 Hybrid methods
- 1.5 Visitors Geolocation
- 1.6 Click analytics
- 1.7 Customer lifecycle analytics
- 1.8 Other methods
2 Key definitions
3 Common sources of confusion in web analytics
- 3.1 The hotel problem
- 3.2 New visitors + Repeat visitors unequal to total visitors
4 Web analytics methods
- 4.1 Problems with cookies
5 Secure analytics (metering) methods
6 See also
7 References
8 Bibliography
9 External links

On-site web analytics technologies

Many different vendors provide on-site web analytics software and services. There are two main technological approaches to collecting the data. The first method, logfile analysis, reads

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