Mohit Sewak

Ever wondered how you get to see only those advertisements when you visit any website (with google ad-sense installed) that you are interested in?

Is it that everyone likes the same products that you like, or is it that google knows what product category you are interested in?

Its no brainer right?,  its the second option, google is customizing the ads to be shown to you so that your probability of actually hitting those ads (visit probability) and purchasing products from that website/ company (transaction/ purchase probability probability) increases.

Now why Google does so?

Simply because  today’s consumers are empowered enough to control what they see (as in TiVo), and for how long they see it. If your primary purpose to visit that particular website is to gain information from that website, you will simply close that website after your objective is achieved, without giving any revenue model to google (Google also requires money to bring all these services to you and for future R&D), and the site owner.

So in order to engage you in some business activities, it has to really transform you to buying mood by showing all the products that you had always desired to buy, at the price that you had desired to buy (well at least they think that we can afford that product at that price).

Now the big question is how does Google knows what products can lure you the most?

Well here lies the answer to the topic of this Blog, it is Web Analytics!!! (combined with web analysis).

But knowing user preferences (and also calculating the Cost Per Click (CPC) for every click that is made on the ad-banner on any site) is not the only thing that Web Analytics is capable of (although it is one of the largest revenue model, with future scalability). If you ever wondered how I am able to know the: -

1. Number of people coming to my site,

2. No of times each page is viewed,

3. All the key words searched (with their frequency) on my site,

4. The keyword being searched on net that bring people to my site (with their frequency),

5. The keywords that were searched the most (with frequency) on my site, but failed (i did not had contents on that key word), which will help me decide what content i should write next on my site,

6. What were the browsers (with distributive percentage frequency of each) that people used to visit my site (and the error messages that each one received),

7. How much time users spent on each of my page,

8. After which page users were switched off from my site (with frequency), and either closed it, or went to some other site?

9. The tags that drove the maximum traffic for my site, and a lot more insights…

This all and a lot more is possible with  Web Analytics. Although Google Analytics does not offer all such features, but there are many such companies that does.

Now the Question arise that, then what is Web Analysis?

Instead of  writing a full long paragraph explaining it, i will just quote an example to illustrate this. When Google collects all the data of your using various websites, online services, the messages that you send on Facebook, or the scraps that you send and receive on Orkut, the profile that you have mentioned and look out for in LinkedIn, and so on, when collected all together so as to make it meaningful for any the purpose of any analysis is Web Analytics.

But when your profiling (as obtained from the Web Analytics stage above), is used to statistically find what product categories you will be interested in now, and in the future (so that relevant ads can be placed on the websites that you visit), is Web Analysis.

Summing up in short, the collection of RELEVANT data from various sources, and putting it into a form so that it can be used for further analysis is Analytics, and driving useful information from the data collected (using analytics) to derive USEFUL information from it (often using Statistical Softwares), so as to make BUSINESS DECISIONS based on that information is Analysis.

When this process is put to any business process it is called Business Analytics, and Business Analysis (as done by consultancy firms), and when this process is kept specific to online web related process (including social media sites like blogs, twitter, Facebook, discussion forums etc, besides regular websites) the terms used are Web Analytics and Web Analysis.

Summary: -

To summarize the whole concept of Web Analytics in bulleted points (obviously so that you have a ready made power point presentation for any occasion), we can say that web analytics is: -

• Web Analytics is The Decisive Tool for online customer intelligence.
• It is the process of measuring site statistics and analyzing traffic behavior.
• Web analytics can be used to diagnose server or site problems, and measure the effectiveness of marketing and advertising campaigns.
• The main benefits of web analytics are to :

1. 1. Monitor your visitors and users
   2. Measuring and maximizing ROI
   3. Better Target Your Marketing Efforts
   4. Optimize Conversions & your website
   5. Pinpoint Online Revenue-Enhancing Opportunities
   6. Formulate a sales and e-marketing plan
   7. Save On Customer Support Help Customers help Themselves

Tags: Analysis, Analytics, Cost per click, Google ad-sense, user profiling, Web Analysis, Web Analytics

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