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You are here: Home > On-line Guides > World Wide Web > Understand my Web site statistics > Introduction
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Understanding Your Web site Statistics
Introduction
The Web is fundamentally different from most other marketing tools. In traditional marketing, it is relatively easy to construct a profile of your existing customers and target audience, in terms of demographics. With the Web, however, you don't know much at all about the visitors to your Web site - most are anonymous, as they come and go without much of a trace.
The need to better understand visitors, and what they do on a Web site, is behind the increased demand for Web traffic-analysis software. The raw data containing information about visitors to your Web site comes in the form of log files. These are usually available from your Internet Service Provider (ISP) along with the software needed to interpret them.
Interpretation of log files provides behavioural data about visitors, including the types of companies or individuals that visit your site, where they came from, and what they did whilst on the site. With the number of Internet users and sites increasing, the number of page requests increases exponentially. Web traffic-analysis software can help to draw conclusions from this seemingly unmanageable volume of behavioural data.
The ultimate goal is to combine this behavioural information with traditional demographic information. This allows measurement of how people actually respond to your Web site. In the early days this information is mainly used by SME's to see what content is of particular interest to visitors. It is also the foundation of personalised one-to-one marketing techniques, allowing a business to target specific audiences with customised products and services that directly meet their needs.
The Web traffic-analysis market has only developed in the last few years. Today it is a multi-million dollar segment of the software industry. Clearly, this is being driven by the growth of the World Wide Web, and the desire to know as much as possible about visitors, through self-identification, registration, and Web logs.
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