Web analytics and ROI Tracking

Every website is created with the motive of offering relevant and accurate information about a subject to its visitors but how would one gauge the number of visitors’ actually reading the content provided on the site. In order to know the popularity of a site and its usefulness to its visitors, it is pertinent to have statistical information about the most visited pages, most captivating content section, and return visits. A website owner can bring quite fruitful amendments into his/her website only if he tracks the number of his visitors and their behavior.

The most practical way of analyzing and measuring a site’s visitors’ behavior comes from Web analytics. It brings up the proper measurement of the best converting pages, the percentage of visitors, unique visitors, return visits, exit pages, goals, entry pages, geographic localization and much more to highlight the pages that are capable of letting you reach your objectives. In addition, you avail comprehensive information about:

•    The location from where most of your traffic comes
•    Competent landing pages that encourage sales
•    Affiliate or partner site sending the most converting traffic
•    Affiliates delivering low quality, low converting traffic
•    Marketing strategies offering the best Return On Investment

Hence, Web Analytics largely helps in boosting up the measurable results of a marketing campaign, which eventually enhances the return on investment.
Now comes the question that how one can use these web analytics to measure the performance of the site. Broadly, there are two main approaches of collecting web analytics data.

•    Log Files Analysis: In this, log files are checked to gather information about all transaction stored in the web server records.

•    Page Tagging: This one uses JavaScript on each page to alert a third-party server on any requirement of a page by the web browser. It is an adequate solution for e-business websites. A very common example of this sort is Google analytics.

If practiced both, one may find considerable differences in the results gained by both abovementioned techniques. The difference is mostly created on the grounds of two major things; file caching and page tagging. In case of file caching, if the option of file caching is active on returning visitor’s web browser then the request for the file he has already seen will not be sent to the web server, and a local copy will get displayed. Hence, the log files analysis software would not be able to identify multiple visits some times. On the other hand, Page tagging depends on the visitor browser voluntarily providing the analytical information requested. Moreover, many browsers hinder data collection due to security reasons.

The main benefit of log file analysis is the logging of data by your web server. Web server records every transaction irrespective of the visitors browser settings. The data reaches your server directly in regular format denying the requirement of third party server. Also, log files offer complete information regarding all the visits from search engine spiders, robots along with failed requests which are quite a significant piece of information for appropriate website optimization.

With page tagging, the JavaScript is called every time the page is loaded. This gives you a way to track exactly your visitors’ behaviors even if they load the web page locally from their cache. Also, it can account on events that are free from the involvement of any request to the web server.