Internet marketers use web analytics to measure the success of portions of their websites. No longer limited to simple visitor traffic counts, web analytics now tell website owners a variety of details about their visitors in addition to quantifying the success (or lack of) a recent advertising campaign.
Web analytics come in two forms” “off-site” and “on-site.” Your website’s potential audience is analyzed using off-site analytics. Your actual visitor behavior is measured using on-site analytics.
The most common tool used to measure analytics is Google Analytics. By purchasing this service, you receive unique code that is entered in the appropriate places within your website. From that point forward, Google Analytics tracks visitor behavior. You will learn where visitors clicked through from, where they are located, how long they spent on each page, which page they left your site from, if they came back, if they completed a desired call to action, etc.
Usually, this information is compared to pre-established key performance indicators, which then tell you if your website is performing as desired. If not, additional testing may be conducted to configure a more desirable configuration resulting in more conversions for you.
