- contributed by Sowparnika Gopal 
Any technology savvy person can very well define the term logs. Logs are nothing but records. Records that gives an impression about your activity, be it your own computer, the attendance at your work place, time spent on your tasks or anything… When you have a record of any activity; it is called, Logging in your activity. These logs act as data. These are saved with a purpose. If you want, you can go back to them and analyze them to conclude what you have been doing, what you should have been doing and what could be done.
We shall discuss here, about such data, that we get from websites, how we derive numbers out of them and how we analyze them. Here, the term for the logs, is Web logs. They log in activity on your website. This can be further analyzed to derive meaningful conclusions on what visitors have been doing on your site, what you wanted them to do and what could be done, to get them do what you want them to do. Converting the data into information is the ideal objective of the analysis, and that’s what we shall try and focus on here.
What can web analytics measure?
Numbers are easy to derive. Technology-driven world has made numbers so simple and easy to derive. When we talk about analytics we mean numbers, that helps solve your website-related problems and that which will help improve your current web performance. The basic thing about web analytics is the analysis of a series of records which can be crushed to get meaningful data and interpretations. When we talk of records where our data in question is saved, we are talking about
- Log files
- Page tagging
Well if you are a business person intending to do get your website analyzed, I don’t think I should really get into the technical details at this point of time. We shall do it a little later, But to begin with, let’s do this. Now that you know what web analytics means, let’s see what it can do to businesses.
When you have a business, you have a website to support it. And when you have a website, you have to define your purpose of having it.
Ok, I’m asking you… What is the objective of your website?
Now, if the first answer that comes to your mind is something along the lines of…, because the generation is such that everyone needs a website.
Then, you need to relook at if you need a website at all. There is more to a website that just having a presence on the World Wide Web.
A website can serve different purposes. Be it, providing information, online marketing of your products or services, lead generation or actual sales. When you provide information on your website you are actually making it easier for someone seeking the information. It may be anyone. But you are making it easier for them to know you. It is a step shorter than waiting for someone to know about you from god-knows-where?! When they learn about you, they will decide what they want to do next. Would they approach you for a need that suits them, or decide to just know and leave? So, it is necessary that you provide all that you think the others need to know about you on your website.
Now, when it comes to analytics, what strikes to me, is there a definite pattern in web analytics for a website that already exists? Let me just quickly jot down things in order as they come to my mind:
- Analyze the current status of the website
- Suggestions and basic changes on the site with respect to the design and layout
- Decide your source of data for analytics
- Decide your tool for analytics
- Configure your tool/s to match your requirements
- Drill the numbers from the tool selected
- Check with a small date range or even a day with the accuracy of numbers
- Set the Key Performance Indicator’s (KPIs) and, document where and how of the data points in the KPI
- Fish for numbers
- Check and recheck the authenticity of numbers
- Draw the trend lines wherever and whenever the data is available
- Analyze the numbers – Give reasons wherever possible
- Give suggestions based on your data
- Forecast your trend depending on the industry standards, activity on your site and past numbers
- Suggest marketing strategies that will boost your online activities
- Analyze the effectiveness of your suggestions and forecast
- Check if it meets your defined objectives, goals and targeted numbers
It is not necessary that all these steps are actually needed. For instance when I say forecasting your trend, you need to get into in-depth statistics to know how you can do something like that. It’s definitely not a matter of chance, that we can guess numbers!