Web Analytics
Definition
The measurement and analysis of website data to improve performance.
Example Use Case
A marketing agency uses Google Analytics to track conversion rates.
Web analytics is the collection and interpretation of what people do on a site: which pages they reach, where they arrive from, where they leave, and which actions they complete. Its purpose is to replace assumptions about visitor behaviour with evidence.
The measurement half is easier than it used to be and more fragile than it looks. Consent requirements, blocked scripts, and privacy features mean no tool captures every visitor, so absolute numbers are estimates rather than counts. That is tolerable for comparison — this week against last, one channel against another — but misleading when treated as precise totals.
The analysis half is where the value sits. A report nobody acts on has not achieved anything; the useful questions are narrow and tied to a decision, such as which landing pages produce qualified enquiries or where a checkout loses people. Define events deliberately, keep definitions consistent over time, and prefer a few trustworthy measures to a dashboard of uncertain ones. See KPI and data layer.
