Web Analytics is a type of measurement, which includes data collection, data analysis and reporting for the purpose of optimizing web site usage. There are a number of web analytics that are available today. Each program uses different approaches in obtaining data and performing the analysis. Google and Yahoo have their own analytics programs. Both of these programs are quite well known.

Web analytics can be categorized into two main categories, which are Off-site and On-site . Off-site analytics is web measurement and analysis regardless of whether you own or maintain a website. The measurements would be your website's potential audience, visibility and comments. Meanwhile, On-site analytics measures the performance of your website, commercially. This data usually compared against key performance indicators for performance. The data collection and analysis are used to improve your website or your marketing campaigns audience response. Consequently, both of these analytics are used to improve the quality of your website and give you ideas about traffic building.

To those of you who are new to the web world, web analytics is vital for you. You can use the data to monitor what your targeted audiences need and want. It is the mainstream method to improve your success rates and find out where your traffic is coming from.. With all the analysis, you can use the data for testing alternative layouts, contents, offers, ads etc. And of course, identify the winning combination.

Luring users to your website is good, but when you hit the right niche, captivate them with your pages and giving your visitors what they want is the best. Web analytics will help you with this. It will help you identify which advertisements bring you the most traffic, which of the advertisements bring you the most sales. Furthermore, it will help you tell whether the user landed on your website from paid click or from the natural search engine results. In other words, you can easily backtrack your users. Additionally, you can find out when your visitors came into your site from a paid link, just looking around or did they just leave when they hit your homepage. Without any doubt, any kind of analytics is a powerful tool to help you be successful online.

Some web analytics even helps you with web server monitoring. You will be alerted via your email or text messages whenever your website is down. Most of the time, users will lose interest whenever a website fails to deliver in a timely manner. As a result, you might lose them to a competitor who is just a “click a way”. Ensuring all the elements of your website are functioning properly is definitely critical in order to maximize your potential traffic, and subsequently, you sales.

You will have a few format options that you can view your web analytics data collections. All reports can be viewed in your browser or downloaded in Microsoft Word or Excel documents too. Reports can be exported for specific days required or a data range. Some of them provides the reports to you by emailing you daily, weekly or even monthly too.