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PERSPECTIVE
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What’s the Difference? A Comparison of Web Analytics to Web Statistics
In the old days, a program ran on the back end of a Web site that churned out pages and pages of raw data that was —
- Hard to read;
- Hard to interpret; and,
- Not particularly helpful.
That was the world of Web statistics. Today, Web site data is easy to read, easy to understand and indispensable for improving site performance. Welcome to the world of Web analytics.
Perhaps the greatest drawback of the early Web statistics programs was their inability to track user behavior on a Web site. Among other things, today’s Web analytic tools allow companies to monitor —
- Which page a user enters on;
- Which pages he visits, also called a “session;”
- Which page he leaves from; and,
- Which search engines drive traffic to the site.
For interpreting site performance and managing paid search campaigns, this information is invaluable. Knowing that a high number of users leave the site from a particular page suggests the page may contain confusing navigation, weak content, and/or faulty programming. Knowing a particular search engine drives 80% of the traffic indicates how Web marketers can get the best return on their paid search expenditures.
Several Web analytic technologies are available; by far the two most popular are logfiling and page tagging. Each has benefits and drawbacks.
Logfiling collects data directly from the Web server and provides a wide range of accurate information, but without much depth. For example, logfiling precisely tracks “hits”, or the number of requests for a given file from the Web server. However, since a typical Web page contains dozens of files, counting hits greatly inflates the measure of site traffic. Furthermore, hits do not identify unique site visitors—an obvious key to understanding site popularity.
In contrast, page tagging uses cookies to collect specific types of data on a remote server, producing a less complete but far more detailed picture of user behavior. Cookies enable data collection of user information not readily available through logfiling, such as page views, new visitors, and geographic location. However, if the user’s browser disables cookies or does not interface with the page tagging program, no information will be collected.
Which method of Web analytics — logfiling or page tagging — is the right one? While logfiling may be adequate for companies with a modest Web presence, those taking a more aggressive approach are likely to need page tagging to evaluate site traffic and marketing campaigns. Either method allows Web marketers to review, analyze, predict and plan — a welcome change from the days of Web statistics, when Web marketing was often an educated guess.
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