Web Analytics Technologies Data Sources

Web analytics technologies

There are at least two categories of web analytics; off-site and on-site web analytics.

• Off-site web analytics refers to web measurement and analysis regardless of whether you own or maintain a website. It includes the measurement of a website's potentialaudience (opportunity), share of voice (visibility), and buzz (comments) that is happening on the Internet as a whole.
• On-site web analytics, the most common, measure a visitor's behavior once on your website. This includes its drivers and conversions; for example, the degree to which different landing pages are associated with online purchases. On-site web analytics measures the performance of your website in a commercial context. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators for performance, and used to improve a website or marketing campaign's audience response. Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics are the most widely used on-site web analytics service; although new tools are emerging that provide additional layers of information, including heat maps and session replay.

Historically, web analytics has been used to refer to on-site visitor measurement. However, this meaning has become blurred, mainly because vendors are producing tools that span both categories. Many different vendors provide on-site web analytics software and services. There are two main technical ways of collecting the data. The first and traditional method, server log file analysis, reads the logfiles in which the web server records file requests by browsers. The second method, page tagging, uses JavaScript embedded in the webpage to make image requests to a third-party analytics-dedicated server, whenever a webpage is rendered by a web browser or, if desired, when a mouse click occurs. Both collect data that can be processed to produce web traffic reports.

Web Analytics Data Sources

The fundamental goal of web analytics is to collect and analyze data related to web traffic and usage patterns. The data mainly come from four sources:^[3]

1. Direct HTTP request data: directly comes from HTTP request messages (HTTP request headers).
2. Network level and server generated data associated with HTTP requests: not part of an HTTP request, but it is required for successful request transmissions. For example, IP address of a requester.
3. Application level data sent with HTTP requests: generated and processed by application level programs (such as JavaScript, PHP, and ASP.Net), including session and referrals. These are usually captured by internal logs rather than public web analytics services.
4. External data: can be combined with on-site data to help augment the website behavior data described above and interpret web usage. For example, IP addresses are usually associated with Geographic regions and internet service providers, e-mail open and click-through rates, direct mail campaign data, sales and lead history, or other data types as needed.