Web analytics helps optimize the web usage. Internet data can be measured, collected, and analyzed using the web analytic tools. Web analytics can be categorized into two types, namely on-site and off-site web analytics. Let us understand both these types in a little detail.

Off-site web analytics is used to measure the web, regardless of whether or not you own a website, or maintain it. The main focus of off-site web analytics is potential audience of the website, visibility, and the commenting (participation) that is happening on the web.

On-site web analytics on the other hand has everything to do with your website. The focus of the analysis is to measure the people visiting your website. Evaluation is done on the pages of your website that interest your audience. Also the other aspects of your website that gets the visitors to make purchases are considered. This type of web analytics is used to gauge the performance of your website in a commercial perspective. The resulting data out of the analysis done is used to optimize and improve the commercial value of the website.

Web analytics has its origin as old as the web itself. Gone are the days when web analytics was all about technical analysis of web. Today, the web analytic tools are used extensively for online marketing purposes. Although the analysis has improved by leaps and bounds, a lot still needs to be discovered and implemented. More and more web developers and marketers must share the analytic tools and use it to potential.

As you may know, websites record all the user interactivity in a log file. The log file contains the details about the user requests (hits) separated by a comma. In olden days, websites only contained text pages. These log files therefore only recorded the user requests for such text pages. A smart programmer wanted to draw a report out of this log file. He therefore programmed a utility to automatically scan the log file and report the number of user hits. This utility gave birth to what is called web analytics.

Today, the websites contain pages that do much more than just display text. There are animations, graphics, videos, sound and many other user interactivities on offer. A website owner is always keen to learn the number of hits made on such pages, by the visitors. The number of hits also gives you an idea about the performance of your website and the different pages in it. Web analytics help you do just that. You can view all such reports in a user friendly way. There are also graphs that display the hit rate of your web pages.

It may be noted that the web analytic tools are designed to generate reports based on the content present in the log file. If your server fails to log the details into the log file, your web analytic tool would have nothing to generate report from. As obvious, the analytic tool would generate different reports for different websites, depicting the rate of user hits for the different pages of the website.