Web analytics are derived in two primary ways, so far (more on this later), JavaScript tags and web server log files. This is pretty much the universal way that web statistics are collected. There are dozens of books out there that cover this in dozens of different ways; Web Analytics Demystified (which I’m reading now), Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, Actionable Web Analytics, Web Site Measurement Hacks, Google Analytics 2.0, and diverging into a sub-topic of web analytics is Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day. These books of course cover much more than just web analytic tagging methods, but they’re good resources for discovering more about the field.
Web analytics can be used by almost any sector of the web industry. Some of these divisions include; content, commerce, lead generation, and self service sites. Each of these separate divisions would track differing statistics, ranging from gross margin, gross margin return on investment (GMROI), net profit, total sales, average order size, or accessory attachment rate all the way to average page views per visit, average visits per visitor, click through on on-site ads, first-time versus returning visitors. We analytics cover the full spectrum of feature sets in almost any type of web application you could think of.
I’ve also started to stumble into specific techno analytics speak. One of the words that hit me kind of funny is sessionizing. First off, it is not technically a word. It breaks convention from a real word that would be created or used in the English Language. But really, I guess nobody cares if it gets the point across. Plus we’re talking about the marketing industry here; it couldn’t possibly hurt to draw more attention to something with faux words.
Sessionizing is a custom web analytics adjective. Sessionizing is the process of assigning a unique visitor to one or more actions that occurred within a defined period or visit. There are other words, and analytics speak, that I will cover later. For now, I’ll just let the word sessionizing sink in a little bit. If you think I’m joking, I’m very serious, so be aware when you hear it in the analytics industry, that it truly does mean something now. I’m sure it will end up in the dictionary within the next few years anyway. Then it will be as real as any other English Word.
Really though, it is just one more entertaining part of this part of the technology sector!
Some of the other things that starting here has made me ponder. Some I can’t mention yet, others include; what would I measure on this site, how could I use this to improve my search engine optimization, and other such things that I generally don’t ponder. I get the feeling that I’ll be thinking a lot more about these things in the coming days and weeks. Cheers to that, I’m off for a few beers and a weekend of doing absolutely nothing in particular!
