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Web Analytics or Website Statistics or Web Traffic Stats

What is Web Analytics (Website Statistics or Web Traffic Stats)?

Web analytics (also known as Website statisitcs or Web Traffic Stats) is the study of website visitors' behavior. In a commercial context, Web analytics especially refers to the use of data collected from a website to determine which aspects of the site work towards the business objectives; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase.
At a general level, data collected almost always includes Web traffic reports. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators (KPIs) and used to improve a website or marketing campaign's audience response.

It's Not Web Analytics. It's People Analytics.

Many Web analysts would argue however that website statistics can be more accurately defined as people analytics. Web traffic stats like hits, page views and sessions are good to track and do provide marketers with some idea of the events taking place on a site. But when it comes down to analyzing the effectiveness of a site from the visitor's perspective, it is actually more important to understand how people behave and interact with a site.

A Single Number is Not the Answer

Analytics software makes it easy to produce a nice average because it can perform enormous numbers of calculations quickly. Unfortunately, Web analytics data is highly variant and a single average tells you very little.

Instead, you've got to focus your decisions around the averages for two or more visitor groups. For example, the "average time on site" tells you almost nothing when used alone. It just isn't that interesting that organic search visitors spent an average of 54 seconds on a landing page. When compared across PPC vs SEO visitors (using labeling of course) it reveals a great deal about those two groups. It IS interesting that organic search visitors spent 54 seconds on a landing page when you know that PPC visitors spent, on average, 123 seconds on the same page. You might want to see why there's such a big difference.

Keep in mind that "the average visitor" doesn't exist. You instead have different groups of visitors that are constantly in flux - this means that they may have an attribute such as "average number of pages viewed" that is higher for some than others. The best data comes from such comparisons, and from frequently exploring the visitor groups by segmentation.

Web Analytics is a Process

If anything else, Web analytics is a continuous improvement process. It is not enough just to have reports each month, you need to be analyzing these reports so you can ensure that the website is always responding to the needs of its visitors.

Once you gathered your data, analyzed the results, proposed changes and implemented these changes you repeat the process all over again.