Abstract
Web analytics is the practice of analyzing digital data about online visitors to websites and apps to gain insights that inform business decisions. Web analytics focuses on collecting, measuring, analyzing, and reporting digital data to improve insights concerning web traffic patterns and user behavior. Many organizations use web analytics to monitor and analyze website traffic, identify favorite pages, determine user interests, and stay on top of emerging trends. The data collected is used to restructure websites, highlight security issues, indicate bandwidth problems, determine organizational key performance indicators (such as sales or revenue), and obtain societal insights. Organizations can use web analytics to measure the success of their online marketing efforts and to understand user behavior on a website, which can help them improve their website design, content, and overall user experience.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Booth, D., Jansen, B.J.: A review of methodologies for analyzing websites. In: Web Technologies: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications, pp. 145–166 (2010)
Buzikashvili, N., Jansen, B.J.: Limits of the web log analysis artifacts. In: Workshop on Logging Traces of Web Activity: The Mechanics of Data Collection (2006)
Dumais, S., Jeffries, R., Russell, D.M., Tang, D., Teevan, J.: Understanding user behavior through log data and analysis. In: Ways of Knowing in Human Computer Interaction, pp. 349–372. Springer, New York
Jansen, B.J.: The wrapper: An open source application for logging user–system interactions during searching studies. In: Logging Traces of Web Activity: The Mechanics of Data Collection Workshop at the International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 1–4 (2006)
Jansen, B.J.: Understanding user-web interactions via web analytics. Synthesis Lect. Inf. Concepts, Retrieval, Serv. 1(1), 1–102 (2009)
Jansen, B.J., Jung, S.G., Salminen, J.: Measuring user interactions with websites: a comparison of two industry standard analytics approaches using data of 86 websites. PloS One 17(5), e0268212 (2022)
Jiang, J., He, D., Allan, J.: Searching, browsing, and clicking in a search session: changes in user behavior by task and over time. In: Proceedings of the 37th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 607–616 (2014)
Kämpf, M., Tessenow, E., Kenett, D.Y., Kantelhardt, J.W.: The detection of emerging trends using wikipedia traffic data and context networks. PLoS ONE 10(12), e0141892 (2015)
Sankar, M.M., Khadir, F., Senthilmurugan, P.: Web and social media analytics. In: Marketing Analytics: A Machine Learning Approach, p. 303 (2023)
Saura, J.R.: Using data sciences in digital marketing: framework, methods, and performance metrics. J. Innov. Knowl. 6(2), 92–102 (2021)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jansen, B.J., Aldous, K.K., Salminen, J., Almerekhi, H., Jung, Sg. (2024). The Foundations of Web Analytics. In: Understanding Audiences, Customers, and Users via Analytics. Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41933-1_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41933-1_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-41932-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-41933-1
eBook Packages: Synthesis Collection of Technology (R0)