Chapter 1. Introducing Web Analytics
This book is about Google Analytics, and at some level that means it is also about web analytics. It’s important to note that Google Analytics is not the same as web analytics. Web analytics is a business process used to continuously improve your online business. Google Analytics is a tool to quantitatively measure what happens on your website. Just because you have Google Analytics does not mean you are doing web analytics.
Before we dive into Google Analytics, I believe it’s important to establish how Google Analytics should fit into your overall analytics strategy.
Defining Web Analytics
Rather than creating another definition of web analytics (there are a lot of them out there), I prefer to reference Avinash Kaushik’s concise yet thorough definition. In his book Web Analytics: An Hour a Day (Wiley), Kaushik defines web analytics as:
The analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from your website and the competition, to drive a continual improvement of the online experience that your customers, and potential customers have, which translates into your desired outcomes (online and offline).
This definition encapsulates three main tasks every business must tackle when doing web analytics:
Measuring quantitative and qualitative data
Continuously improving your website
Aligning your measurement strategy with your business strategy
Let’s look at each part of the definition and break it down into more detail.
Quantitative and Qualitative Data
Web analytics ...
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