At MNJ Software, we prepare monthly Search Engine Ranking Reports that summarize
the activities undertaken and list the Ranking and Link Popularity of your website.
These reports help track the progress of your website over a period of time, so
you can see for yourself how the improvement in rankings has led to an increase
in traffic. You should be able to measure the Return on Investment (ROI) and our
reports help you do just that. We monitor your website constantly so you don’t have
to.
Web analytics tools track website user activity. Tracking activity gives organizations the ability to optimize their content.
Web analytics have also grown beyond tracking web usage to include interactions with social media and mobile apps. This expanded approach is sometimes called digital analytics.
The data from web analytics tools help companies evaluate and improve their online presence. Web analytics business objectives include things like:
- Attracting more visitors
- Increasing sales
- Improving customer engagement
- Improving customer retention
Insights from web analytics tools can drive actions such as:
- Refining website content
- Adjusting website design
- Reallocating marketing dollars
The ultimate goal is to optimize for the desired business objective.
Web Analytics Features & Capabilities
- Individual-level tracking
- Real-time analytics
- A/B testing
- Mobile analytics
- Attribution modeling
- On-the-fly segmentation
- Ecommerce tracking
- Funnel analysis
- Cohort analysis
- Cross-device tracking
- In-page analytics (Session recording, click tracking, mouse tracking, heatmaps)
- Goal conversion tracking
- Event tracking
- Privacy compliance
- On-premise option
- Benchmarking
Web Analytics Tools
Tags
Most web analytics tools use page tagging to track online activity. A ‘tag’ is placed in a website’s JavaScript code.
Using the tag, analytics tools can detect when someone visits the page. The tool can also track link clicks, video views and other events. Most tools can also track users’ IP address, geography, screen size and web browser.
Cookies
Web analytics also use cookies. Cookies are a small piece of data attached to each site visitor’s browser. They are designed to track a user’s session and future visits. This helps companies identify new visitors and returning visitors, in order to understand user behavior over time
Most tools track similar web, social and mobile metrics. The most common metrics found with web analytics tools include:
- The number of people using a website (visits, unique visitors, pageviews)
- Who they are (geolocation of visitors, browser and device type, registered and unregistered users)
- Where they came from (referring source, search keyword)
- What they are doing while there (Time spent on site, conversions, click path, bounce rate)
This information is presented on a dashboard. The dashboard of web analytics tools is a central source of information for companies. Dashboards can usually be customized to segment data by user persona, date range, or other attributes.
No web analytics vendor can promise 100% accuracy in data. This is because people can delete cookies, and browsers can restrict JavaScript, for example. Therefore, different tools will produce slightly different results for the same metric. But web analytics tools still provide valuable insight into customer needs and online behavior.
Free Web Analytics Tools
Effective web analytics don’t always have to cost money. There are a number of free and freemium web analytics tools.