What is web analytics?

Web analytics involves collecting, measuring, evaluating, and reporting data from a website.

The purpose of this process is to gain insights that help to understand and improve web performance or usage, and thus is an effective tool for evaluating web traffic, market research and website performance optimization.

Website analytics help provide important information… such as number of website visitors, page views, time spent on each page, traffic sources, bounce rate, etc.

Analytics reports are used to analyze the quality and quantity of web analytics traffic before using these metrics to measure ROI in market research, ad campaign optimization, and user experience enhancement.

A Brief History of Web Analytics

Web analytics has been around for almost three decades. However, its relevance in digital marketing has recently increased its popularity.

It first started in the early days of the Internet. In 1993, the first website analytics company, Webtrends, was launched - and is still operating.

Later in 1995, Analog, a data analysis log, was established. This was the beginning of business analytics. Earlier, analysis was mainly done by technical staff. The company provided easy-to-analyze documents and charts. Moving forward, other web analytics services, such as WebSideStory and Coremetrics, sprouted up.

Today, web analytics has become more sophisticated than ever thanks to advances in programming technologies.

Advantages of Web Analytics

Are you considering investing in web analytics but wondering if it's worth it? If yes, here are the main benefits of analytics.

Track online traffic.

It provides web traffic information, such as the visitors or users of your website at any given time, how long they spend on the site, where the traffic comes from, and how visitors interact. Analytics provide easy-to-understand data, helping your company understand what the best results are and how to invest resources more effectively.

Bounce rate measurement

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave without interacting with your site. A high bounce rate indicates that your content isn't engaging or doesn't match search intent. This is an important parameter that can help you improve user experience and consequently increase conversion rates.

Optimizing advertising campaigns

Analytics increases the return on investment on marketing campaigns by providing tools that help with tracking and optimization. A few years ago, advertisers didn't have the tools to track the performance of their ads in real time. Today, you can track performance on the go and optimize accordingly

Data-driven decisions

According to a recent survey, highly data-driven companies are three times more likely to report major improvements in decision-making than organizations that rely less on data.

Great businesses thrive on high quality decisions. And the only way to make decisions that drive business success is to make data-driven decisions. For example, it is difficult (if not impossible) to do what your target audience wants if you know little or nothing about their needs. Offsite and onsite analytics help you discover what your ideal potential customer is looking for. This enables you to position yourself to attract more business

Competitive edge

Web analytics provides information about the performance of your business and gives you a glimpse into the actions of your competitors. Such intelligence makes it easy to outperform your competitors. For example, analytics help uncover web content gaps, which open your company up to opportunities your competitors are missing out on.

Market research made easy.

Before recent advances in analytics technology, market research was extremely expensive and time-consuming. And brands need access to detailed and personalized insights. Web analytics solutions have streamlined market research. Today, you can do thorough market research with minimal investment.

Why is DoubleCloud the best analytics building platform?

DoubleCloud is a leading analytics solution provider that provides analytics for advertising scenarios and web, mobile and gaming apps. The platforms help you build sub-second data analytics solutions and pipelines using open source technologies, such as ClickHouse and Apache Kafka. 

DoubleCloud is great for the following reasons.

Trusted by real engineers — DoubleCloud services are trusted by Honeybadger.io, Practicum, etc.

Integrates with AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and more.

Hybrid storage supported by S3 for cost efficiency.

An advanced data stack for end-to-end analytics.

Conclusion

Web analytics help you measure and evaluate your site's performance. KPIs enable you to implement strategies to achieve your business goals. You can use commercial web analytics tools to get the job done effectively. However, some analytics building platforms, such as DoubleCloud, enable you to build data analytics solutions using best-of-breed open source technologies..