21 Warning Signs You Need More Information On Analytics

By Robert Colaluca


An e-commerce website needs to have a consistent flow of visitors making purchases through the site, in order for it to be successful. Accordingly, any investment a business makes into establishing, managing, and promoting its e-commerce site must yield positive, profitable returns. To ensure such returns, the business should ideally have a way to monitor the productivity of the various elements of its e-commerce operation. To this end, an increasing number of businesses are beginning to use intelligent web analytics as integral parts of their e-commerce operations.

In order to understand what elements of its e-commerce operations are yielding sales and profits, a business must use web analytics to monitor and measure the behavior of its website. Besides just knowing how many visitors and returning visitors the site regularly gets, it is important to know where the visitors are coming from, and which partners or affiliate websites are sending actual purchasing customers. Similarly, it is important to be able to see which marketing strategies and landing pages encourage the most people to make purchases. When assessing which parts of its website needs revision, or, perhaps, which of its marketing strategies need to be stopped, this is the kind of information that is most functional for a business.

There are to primary approaches that a business can take when looking to add web analytics components to its website. One of these approaches a web server's log file analysis, whereas the other uses each webpage's JavaScript in a process called page tagging. It is important to note that it is common to get different sets of data and information between the two techniques, even if they are being used for the same exact purpose. This is largely because log file analysis requires a visitor to have file caching enabled on its browser, just as visitors will disable various data collection processes, thereby preventing page tagging. Therefore, many businesses will employ both approaches within their web analytics processes.

Regardless of the type of browser a person is using, web servers directly record the data of every transaction into a standard, easy to use log file format. Information regarding web crawler visits, failed requests, and other valuable data are provided by these log files, all of which can be used to optimize e-commerce operations. In a similar fashion, a JavaScript is called whenever a webpage is loaded, recording all traceable actions and behaviors a visitor may engage in on a given site. Still, for any of this information to really be valuable, it is up to the business to effectively use it within a functional strategy.

Many people are just now beginning to realize that we are now in an age of information. Especially when it comes to business and e-commerce , the analysis of information about customers and website visitors can be vital for manifesting profits. As such, it is important for any business with an e-commerce setup to perform extensive research into how web analytics could help them revise and optimize their overall operations.




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