What Is Web Analytics? Web Metrics?

Posted by raj on 04/26/06 in Web metrics + analytics, What is

Web metrics and web analytics are closely related terms. Web metrics refers to specific metrics or measurements related to website/ weblog traffic. Web analytics refers to the study and analysis of those metrics. Studying the metrics of your website/ weblog may make the difference between having a healthy site and one that no one visits.

Web metrics can be measured over various periods of time including hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, seasonally, or yearly. Daily metrics and average daily metrics (averaged over a longer period) are those most commonly used by site publishers.

Some example daily metrics are:

Number of unique visitors. This is never 100% accurate, since some visitors may use more than one computer on a given day. As well, more than one visitor may use the same computer (public access), but will appear as one unique visitor.
Number of repeat visitors (i.e., those that have visited the site before, or at least during the tracking period)
Number of new visitors (never visited before, or at least not during the tracking period)
Number of pageviews. Everyone that has a website/ weblog is probably most concerned with this metric (and # unique visitors).

There are many more metrics that can be deduced, as well as custom metrics produced through more advanced statistical techniques. The importance of a particular metric depends solely on the website publisher’s needs.

For example, a site owner who publishes articles in the hopes of attracting traffic that will clicks on ads will be interested in the metrics of: daily visitors, daily pageviews, CTR (clickthrough rate), and so on.

Someone who does not display ads but is interested in traffic in the hopes of generating consulting leads will want to know not only the number of daily visitors but the number of returning visitors. This is because a lead sometimes will visit 3 or 4 times before actually purchasing something or even filling out a form.

Still others may be interested in the geographic breakdown of visitors. Are more people visiting from, say, Japan rather than China? Geoplotting visitors may be incredibly valuable for some site publishers.

In fact, anything more than you can learn about your visitors will give you an edge over a publisher who does not track his/ her metrics. Web analytics is an extremely important study for anyone who wants to have a successful online business. Analytics allows you to track trends, watch over the general health of your website/ weblog, and possibly target your site to the needs of your visitors.

Unfortunately, many people are turned off the idea of learning a little bit about web analytics because it involves math, and worse, statistics. However, many of the better analytics packages display metrics in graph form, which is much easier to understand. As well, you do not need advanced math skills to understand most of the more important metrics, for the average website publisher.

If you are already convinced about the value of web analytics and want
to get started, you have several options, including free and paid
packages. However, there are two free web-based services that I
recommend above others as a starting point:

Performancing’s PMetrics - PMetrics is very easy to use and geared specifically towards weblogs. And Performancing has an online community of bloggers whom you can ask questions. PMetrics has no limit to the number of weblogs that you can track, and there’s no waiting list to get accepted. Metrics are collected approximately hourly, and there an API (Application Programmer Interface) so that you can incorporate their package into your own web sofware.
Google Analytics - Google Analytics, formerly called Urchin Analytics, is a very comprehensive package with slick graphics that allows for goal-setting and targeting. It is currently limited to tracking 5 profiles, but there are plans for up to 50. However, within each profile, you can track several websites or weblogs - which you might do if you have related but separate domains. The primary drawback is that they have a waiting list to setup an account, and the service is occasionally slow. While they are working on adding more computing resources to speed up service, their data collection is always several hours behind by design.

There are many other packages that can be used offline or online. In fact, some Internet host providers give away free web-based stats packages, but these are often barebones, showing only some standard metrics and associated graphs, and without the capability to perform analysis. Other very comprehensive and expensive offline analytics packages require that you have access to your web server logs - something that often costs extra if you have a budget host provider.

If you want to learn more about math, statistics, and web analytics specifically for webmasters, website publishers, and bloggers, please visit my MathBlog. There are also older web analytics articles in the V1 and V2 archives of my BlogSpinner weblog. However, as they are a bit harder to find, I will update and publish them on the MathBlog in the near future. As always, you are welcome to ask me a question, and I’ll do my best to respond in a timely fashion.

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