Web analytics provides insights into website visitor behavior by analyzing data from web server logs and user clickstreams. It helps understand how visitors engage with a site and which content they interact with. This informs decisions to optimize the user experience and meet business objectives. Key metrics include page views, visits, unique visitors, and visitor sessions, though these can be inaccurate without proper configuration and analysis. Web analytics requires expertise to interpret data and develop strategic insights that drive meaningful action.

2. Defining Web Analytics
Web Analytics is …
 the process of analyzing the behavior of visitors to
a Web site. The use of Web analytics is said to
enable a business to attract more visitors, retain or
attract new customers for goods or services, or to
increase the dollar volume each customer spends.
 the formal discipline of studying user activities on
a website or web application to understand how
well it fulfils its objectives and meets the
user requirements, and to seek ways to optimize it
to become more usable, relevant and efficient.

3. Introduction
Click stream
Click stream is “the path of mouse clicks and keystrokes a
visitor makes in navigating through a Website.”
The web server log contains a record of every http or ftp request
made as a result of a visitor’s interaction with the web site these
requests are stored in the form of Log Files these log files are
further analyzed and reports are generated out of these
analyzed Log Files

4. Web analytics measures the basics:
• Who
• Where
• When
• What
• How Much

5. What is a website tracking system?
Do you need to know who's visiting your
website, and what they do when they get there?
•A tracking system will tell you who's doing what.
•A website tracking system is a tool suite that provides
you with a full set of statistics to help you monitor and
track visitors to your website.
•A tracking system collects statistical data about your visitor
traffic and aggregates the data into meaningful reports.
•The goal is to help make website management decisions on a
daily basis, for example content updates.

7. Technologies that can be tracked:
All html based webpages, including the following extentions:
.html
.htm
.asp(x)
.php
.jsp
.cfm
Secure SSL pages that are located on a secure server
All types of forum and bulletin boards; including Phpbb,
Vbulletin, UltimateBB etc.
All kinds of web shops; including StoreFront. Shopfactory,
Salescart, Numerous blogs; including Blogger, Movable Type,
Livejournal etc.
Intranet pages (as long as the visitor has a open internet conne

9. Sample & Content of a Log File
195.238.161.136 - - [06/Nov/1998:14:54:33 +0000] "GET/image/navigation/
top_nav/jamba _dips_stat.gif HTTP/1.0" 200743/navigation/top_nav/jamb a_
dips_stat.html HTTP/1.0" "Mozilla/4.05 [en] (WinXP; I)" "Cookie data here"
Here is a list of items which get recorded in the log:
IP address
hostname (not usually activated for performance reasons)
identd (not usually activated as the other end usually doesn't
support it)
Date and time
Request method
Request path
Request protocol
Response status
Response content size
Referrer path
User agent
Cookie values
Logging header

10. Reviewing the vocabulary
 Hits
 meaningless measure for web analytics
 Page Views
 fundamental measure of web analytics
 Visits and Visitors
 most times inaccurate and can be very
misleading
 Unique Visitors
 not accurate unless the web site and
analytics software is configured for
specific counting of unique visitors
 Visitor Sessions
 Most times inaccurate and can be very
misleading

11. Reviewing the vocabulary
 Web Server Logs
 The source data, the gold mine
 Click stream
 The navigation path of a web user through
your site
 Spiders, Crawlers and bots
 Automated programs that scan through web
sites
 Proxy Servers
 Intermediary computers that pool requests and
talk to the internet on behalf of a group of users
 Cookie
- Small piece of Information

12. Developing Strategic Insights
Expertise is more important than
technology
A firm that has a great analyst armed only
with Excel will bury a firm that has
invested heavily in technology but has no
expertise to use it strategically

13. Three reasons why
Web analytics matter

14. Reason 1: The Web is a microcosm of the business
Media and
marketing Sales
Web
analytics
Customer
IT service

15. Reason 2: The Web offers rich customer data
 Actions
 Responses
 Behavior
 Attitudes
 Predictive Analysis

16. Reason 3: The technology scales to other channels
Desktop Contact Devices Retail
apps center and media

18. Traffic reports and
trends Monitor visitors Top lists
Traffic summary Online visitors Top requested pages
Page views First-time visitors Top requested files
Top requested directories /
Visits Returning visitors paths
Visitors Referred visitors Top search engines
New & returning visitors Duration of visit Top search keywords
Click stream / Click
Pages viewed per visit path Top referrers
Reloads Time viewing page Top exit links
Weekly Entry page Top exit pages
Monthly Exit page Top entry pages
Bounce rates Exit links
Referring site
Referring search term

19. Most recently
Technical data requested: Geographical data
Browsers & versions Pages Countries
Operating systems &
versions Files Regions
Screen resolutions Search engines Cities
Screen colors Search keywords DMA-codes
Domains
Referrers ZIP / postal codes
Exit links Telephone area codes
Exit pages Continents
Entry pages Subcontinents

20. Real-time Visitor Monitor Track Unique Visitors
Enhanced clickstream Track unique visitors over
analysis. Explore visitor long periods of time. Track
clickstreams live on a real- first-time and returning
time graphical interface. visitors.
Search Term Analysis Detailed Referrer Reports
Track, record, and analyze Top referrer and search
search terms used to find engine lists. We bring you
your site. Complete list of the "page before". See
terms ordered by actual search results page,
popularity through time. one click before your site.

21. Share Information With Ease Simple to Install
Intuitive & User-friendly.
Add colleagues as users. Add One line of code to add to
clients & their sites. Download your pages. Start tracking
reports into MS Excel. in minutes.
drill-down demographics
Country, Company/ ISP
Cities, states, ZIP codes &
Area codes for N.
See which companies visit America. Also see U.S.
your site. Detailed reports DMA - Direct Market
show all traffic by country of Area Stats.
origin.

26. The Process of Web Analytics
Web Analytics lead to strategic
ACTION!
“When Forrester Research asked Web analytics users
what the hardest part about using analytics is, 53 percent
said acting on the findings, more than double the 24
percent who said it's pulling data together. Until
organizations actually act on data, a Web analytics
initiative's return on investment (ROI) is zero. Acting on
the data is the most important element of Web analytics
-- and the part organizations struggle with the most.”

27. Summarize
 Helps knowing what Visitors think
about the web site
 It helps locating the Geographical
area of the Visitors
 Helps knowing likes & dislikes of
visitors in regard to web site & make
any changes if required
 It Reports the Market Trends
 Helps increasing the Search Engine
Ratings

28. Thanks!
Questions?
Ideas?

29. Reviewing the vocabulary
Web Server Logs
 Web sites are hosted on a web server. Each time you request a page on the
internet you are actually making a request to the web server to send you
the page, its images and any associated files. These requests go to the
server and the server responds by sending the files to your machine’s
browser based on IP address that was used in your request. Every request
made to the web server is generally stored in a log file housed on the web
server. Each request for a page, an image or file travels from your machine
to the server with your IP address and other relevant information. Once it
gets to the server, the server retrieves the files and stores the request in the
web server logs. Web server logs are the basis for much of web analytic
work. These files can be huge depending on the traffic to the site. A retail
site’s logs file may be 100 Meg per day. Without these files web analytics is
not possible.
Click Stream
 A clickstream, or click path, is a list of all the requests made by one visitor
to the web server. The click stream will include the path that the user
navigates as they view a web site. Understanding the clickstream of many
users often gives a web analyst key insights into how a site is used by its
audience. Clickstream analysis is a fundamental methodology used by
web analysts to understand the web audience and their behaviors.

30. Reviewing the vocabulary
Spiders
 Computer robot programs, referred to sometimes as "crawlers" or
"knowledge-bots" or "knowbots" that are used by search engines to roam the
World Wide Web via the Internet, visit sites and databases, and keep the
search engine database of web pages up to date. They obtain new pages by
“crawling through a web site’s pages following its links. As it crawls the
web sites it is updating its list of known pages, and deleting obsolete ones.
Their findings are then integrated into the “search engines database”. Other
firms may also use robots and crawlers for scanning web sites. This is one
of the major sources of false usage data reported in web analytics software.
Proxy Servers
 Most large businesses, organizations, and universities these days use a
proxy server. This is a server that all computers on the local network have to
go through before accessing information on the Internet. By using a proxy
server, an organization can improve the network performance and filter
what users connected to the network can access. When an individual within
the enterprise requests a URL, the request is filtered and received by the
proxy server. If the requested file is not found in the proxy server's cache,
the server acts on behalf of the user, and requests the page from the server
on the Internet using its own IP address. In this case the log files will reflect
the IP number of the proxy server, not that of the individual user.

31. Reviewing the vocabulary
Cookies
 A cookie is a small piece of information which is created
when you interact with web pages programmed to either
store or read the cookie. The cookie file is stored on the web
visitor’s computer and may contain any information that the
web site owner wants to store. Cookies can only be read by
the web site(s) that actually created them so there is some
ways to shield the values that are stored in a cookie from
being generally read by other web site. The information
inside a cookie is stored as a series of name / value pairs
separated by a standard delimiter. For instance a cookie may
look like
 Information can be stored to help you identify specific data
on your web visitors. In the hands of a skilled webmaster,
the cookie offers limitless possibilities in the areas of web
customization and user tracking. Cookies are like little
identification cards passed out by web sites. Each cookie has
six definable attributes: a name, a value, an expiration date,
the domain for which the cookie can be read, the path in
which the cookie can be read, and a Boolean security setting.

32. Reviewing the vocabulary
Web Analytics Software
 The technology that is generally used to parse through the
massive amounts of data generated from traffic to your web
site are tools within the web analytics space. These
technologies allow webmasters and web analysts to scan the
underlying web data to see basic metrics and measures of
use. The tools range in sophistication from shareware to
enterprise wide data warehouse components. The tools
generally use different methods for calculating traffic
measures.
 No tool will provide the data needed for the CMO, the
marketing department or others interested in using the web
for marketing, marketing measurement and strategic
outreach to clients without significant human talent. To
effectively use these tools, the firm needs expertise that can
configure the tool, configure the web site to deliver the
appropriate date for the tool, and most importantly analyze
the resulting data so that it can be transformed into strategic
insights that can support client acquisition and retention.

33. Reviewing the vocabulary
Hits
 The retrieval of any item, like a page, an image or document from a web site will
increment the Hit count. The term has been grossly misused as a measure of web traffic.
Hits are only measures of the number of calls made to a web site server. When a visitor
reviews one web page, calls are made to the server for the page’s HTML code and all of
the images, audio/video files and other supporting files of which there many be dozens.
Therefore one page on the web may cause 1 hit or hundreds of hits.
Page Views -
 One of the fundamental measures of web traffic is the Page View. This is used extensively
in web analytics. Page Views count the number of times an actual human web visitor sees
a web page that is delivered to their browser. Page Views are measures of the number of
Impressions that have been made with the content of your web site. Because Page Views
is a basic audience metric, it is one of the fundamental measures that should be reported
within web analytics.
Visits / Visitors
 When a user arrives on a website, he or she is considered one visitor regardless of how
many web pages he or she looks at. Visits can be calculated in many ways. Therefore the
measure is not standardized causing major problems when comparing the traffic from
multiple sites using different web analytics software. Visits are either counted using the
IP address, a unique ID stored in a cookie or some combination of data that allows for
identification of the web visitor. Visitor measures are often very inaccurate and
misleading.

34. Reviewing the vocabulary
Unique Visitors
 Although often reported in web analytics software, unique visitor
measures are often very inaccurate and misleading. Unless you
have configured the analytic software and your web site to
specifically count unique visitors, this measure may be
meaningless, grossly under reporting actual visitors. Unique
visitors measures require some method to uniquely identify the
web visitor. These measures are also time based. You can
determine unique visitors for one day, one month or one year – all
resulting in different counts.
Visitor Session
 A Visitor Session is a defined quantity of visitor interaction with a
website. The definition will vary depending on how Visitors are
tracked. The Visitor Session is a session of activity that a user with
a unique IP address or Cookie ID spends on a Web site during a
specified period of time. The site administrator determines what
the time frame of a user session will be (e.g., 30 minutes). If the
visitor comes back to the site within that time period, it is still
considered one user session because any number of visits within
that 30 minutes will only count as one session. If the visitor returns
to the site after the allotted time period has expired, say an hour
from the initial visit, then it is counted as a separate user session.