We have all heard the terms “web analytics” or “website analysis” in recent years and some of us are wondering what exactly these terms mean and how they will be useful to us. In this article we will answer these questions, explaining the importance of web analytics for any website owner, what type of information is provided by analytics tools, and what are the most used web analytics tools on the market.

But before we dive into the answers to all of these questions, and the usefulness of these concepts, let's first define what they really are.

What is web analytics?

The term web analytics is used for any activity that is used to collect, measure, and analyze the behaviors and audience of a website in order to understand and optimize the user experience as well as the performance of the site. Web analytics is based on data collected by audience measurement and analysis tools such as Google Analytics. In simpler terms, this is data on:

• Who visits our website?
• How did these visitors get there?
• What did they do once they landed on a page?
• Where did they go after that?
• And much more.

What information does web analysis provide? The majority of website analytics solutions provide data on:1-Your audience:

• The number of visits you have had to the site;
• The proportion of new and recurrent visits;
• Audience demographics, such as country of origin

2-Audience behavior:

• What pages did your visitors land on and from which page did they leave your site? (ex: home page, services page,...)
• What are your most popular pages?
• How long did visitors spend on your site?

3-Campaign data:

• What campaigns attracted visitors to your site?
• The keywords people are looking for to find your site.

How should we use the data? Web analytics platforms provide huge amounts of data on your website. Before starting to analyze all the information collected, you must first decide what the purpose of your website is in order to better focus attention on the most important data.

To give a few examples, taking the cases of an online retailer whose objective is to make sales via its website and a consultant who uses its website to present information about its service offering.

The online retailer will likely be more concerned with conversion metrics, such as the number of purchases made online, while the consultant will likely look at engagement metrics, such as time spent on site and the number of pages visited.

Why is web analytics important?

Web analytics are of paramount importance for a website, for the simple reason that understanding visitor behavior will optimize the experience offered in order to achieve the goals set for your site.

Going back to the first example of an online retailer, by closely analyzing the customer journey, we could have a navigation path similar to the following:

Home page ———— product page ———— delivery detail page ———— billing detail page ———— order summary ———— payment confirmation page

Analyzing this journey will make it possible to understand where visitors leave if they do not complete the transaction. Thanks to this analysis, you will be able to optimize this journey by combining certain pages, by reducing or simplifying the steps of the buying process to remove irritants (a common example is to combine the billing and delivery steps in a single page), so the new journey could be:

Home page ———— product page ———— customer information page ———— order summary ———— payment confirmation page

This very simple example shows that web analysis tools allow you to make changes to your site based on real data, as opposed to changes based solely on opinions.

Web analysis as a measurement tool for web referencing

Web data analysis also allows you to improve your SEO by offering you text leads to use for your SEO. As I said before, when you're starting out with web analytics, it's important to understand what metrics can have the biggest impact on your business. The understanding and the correct definition of these will have a positive influence on the overall ranking of the site.

When analyzing the performance of any website, the main objective is almost always traffic, which is defined as the number of visitors. However, web analytics involves a lot more. If you use Google analytics, for example, as a measurement tool, you should surely consult the “Acquisition” section and more specifically the “Channels” subsections. click on this subsection, then choose “Organic”, and you will find all the search engines that brought visitors to your site. If you've done some work with your SEO, you'll probably see that most search engine traffic comes from Google, or Bing.

Google Analytics, like several other web analysis tools, can also tell you which pages on your website have had a high bounce rate (called bounce rate in English), this is an indicator that measures the percentage of Internet users who entered a web page and left the site afterwards, without consulting other pages. They therefore only saw one page of the site.), this information can be used to analyze these pages and optimize their content in order to offer a better user experience.

By gaining a better understanding of these performance indicators, it is easier to understand how your visitors are behaving on your site and what the impact of your organic and paid SEO efforts has been.

Comparison of some Web Analytics tools

According to a study conducted by Forrester in the last quarter of 2017, the major players in the web analytics market are as follows:

In summary, the key takeaways from this study are as follows:

• Adobe maintains its dominant position and strength in the web analytics market;
• AT internet has quietly continued to strengthen its position in this market;
• IBM wants to embody web analytics that's easy to use. With its “Watson” experience analytics product, IBM wants to enable its customers to optimize web and digital applications to increase conversion, loyalty and customer lifetime value (life time value);
• Google is continuing its foray into the web analytics market. With its 360 analytics suite, Google combines its digital analysis capabilities with those of tag management (360 tag management), site optimization (360 site optimization), data visualization (Data visualization 360) and other Google suite products.
• Webtrekk impresses with good web analytics capabilities at a competitive price. Webtrekk is a customer intelligence platform that connects, analyzes, and activates user and marketing data across devices.

Below is a comparison of the three most used tools on the market, according to three main criteria, namely: price, convenience and ease of install.CriteriaGoogle AnalyticsAdobe Omnitureat InternetPriceFreePayPayantPrayantConvenience*********Convenience*****Ease of installation*******ConclusionThe analysis of websites provides extremely useful information that, if properly collected since the design of the website , then interpreted and put into practice, could significantly improve the performance of your website. Finally, I end this article with two important points to remember about web analysis:

• Ensure that the analysis tools are properly configured in order to collect reliable and quality data;
• Give meaning to this collected data by remembering what is important for your website and your business, then set up tools to monitor your metrics (Dashboard or Dashboard), otherwise all marketing decisions on your site and your business will be compromised.