You have a website. You have a fair idea of how many people visit your site every day/month. But did you know that getting visitors to come to your site is only a small percent of the game? What you really need is for them to stay on your site for longer, view all the right pages, and – if your website is an e-commerce site – buy something. How do you accomplish this? Read on.

Web analytics, very simply, is the study of the behavior of website visitors. If you own, for example, a website which sells jewelry (although web analytics is definitely not only for e-commerce sites), it is in your best interests to know, for example, which region a visitor originates from, what kind of links from the home page are most clicked, which are the top ten most purchased products etc. This will help you to better design your site to convert a larger number of your visitors into ‘lingerers’ and/or buyers. The ultimate goal of web analytics is to understand your customer’s online experience in order to improve it, which in turn will mean greater revenues for you.

Some of the more common terms used in web analytics are:

• Hit: The number of times a file is requested from the web server. A larger number of hits does not necessarily make a page popular, since each webpage typically consists of multiple discrete files, each of which, when downloaded, is counted as a hit.
• Page View: A request for a file with type defined as ‘Page’. A page view generates multiple hits for the reason stated above.
• Unique Visitor: A unique client requesting for pages from the web server. The same person is counted as two unique visitors if he/she accesses the same web page from two different computers. This is because a visitor’s computer, by means of its IP address and/or cookie determines the uniqueness of the page request.
• Session/ Session Duration: A session is a series of web page requests from the same client within a specific time period. Session duration is the average time a user spends on the website in one session.
• Bounce Rate: The percentage of visits that the visitor enters and exits a website at the same page without visiting any other pages on the site.

Two of the most popular sources of data for web analytics are web traffic data and web transactional data. Web traffic data are typically obtained from server log files and JavaScript page tags, which provide a lot of data on visitors to a site. Many websites, like the jewelry selling website mentioned earlier, for example, also has details from all the transactions (like a visitor buying a book), which can be mined for further information.

These two sources of data lead to two main methods of analyzing traffic to a site – logfile analysis and page tagging. One big advantage with logfile analysis is that the data is already there, since servers anyway log all requests made by clients.  Page tagging, on the other hand, required explicit changes made to web pages, which may not be always easy. Web servers also reliably log all transactions, while page tags may be dependent on client browser to work and could result in uncounted page views. One issue with web servers is that, if pages are cached, then page views are generally not logged and could result in missed hits. Servers also cannot log activity which does not make explicit requests to servers, like in the case of interactions with flash movies, or on mouse events.

Some commonly used free web analytics programs are those by Google and Yahoo!, (although the Yahoo! module is available only to merchants and advertisers supported by Yahoo!). These, and similar, modules can easily be integrated with your website and feature a dashboard which gives you access to a wide array of reports and graphs on every aspect of visitor behavior.

If you are really serious about making sure that your website is getting a lot of visibility, you must ensure that you have proper web analytics installed. The feedback that this system provides indicates the strengths and weaknesses of you site. Small tweaks based on the numbers thrown up by analytics can result in tremendous increase in the traffic to your site.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_analytics; http://www.sofizar.com/web-analytics.php