Web 3.0 attempts to enhance the web experience by introducing new applications which are embedded into the websites – all said and done, it is becomes commercially necessary to keep a watch on the hits that are taking place. It becomes necessary to monitor, to measure – if it is allowed to remain vague then it would not be tangible and then it would not be easy to convince advertisers of the prudence of advertising on your web portal, vis-à-vis another portal. This entire process of measuring and analyzing the nature of web traffic is called “Web Analytics”. This can be loosely described as the research of people who access your website online. The people who visit a particular website are referred to as “visitors” and the activities that are performed by them online can be termed as “Metrics”. The most common activities that they take part in would be to see in what manner they learnt about a particular website, how may pages they have seen once they have logged on a particular website, the nature of what they have downloaded and so on and so forth. All these statistics can only serve to improve the quality of the product on offer with the idea of bringing in more advertising revenue.
Let us have a look at what are some of the methods involved in “Web analytics”
There is no one standard method involved but some of the common ones are the analysis of the web server log files and tagging of pages.
What exactly is web server log file analysis?
Web servers have always maintained a detailed record of all the transactions which take place. If one analyses these logs, one would be able to see what is the nature of people who visited a particular website, for how long they stayed on a particular page, on which page they dwelt the maximum time on, what was that they downloaded etc.
The benefits of these are:
1. Web servers, without exception, maintain logs -hence, it is not necessary to amend the code of the web page in order to accommodate the Java script.
2. It would work for all servers even if someone has disabled the Java script on the browser of the visitors.
3. All web servers would contain standard format data and not in a format of any third company.