Unlock the Power of Web Analytics

In the early days of the web (1993), websites were “web pages” and everything was static. These web pages didn’t require much effort to track, so the hit counter was all that was needed. Anytime a web page element was requested or loaded it was called a “hit,” a very basic metric for recording page visits.

The next major evolution (1997) in web analytics came manual tagging. The web wasn’t dynamic just yet, so the page you loaded was the page you would be interacting with. This was perfect for manual tagging. There weren’t many elements on the page, pages were not complex, and when you tagged your website or product, nothing else needed to change unless you redesigned your interface.

In 2005, there was no SaaS category. Software was still installed via CD-ROM aka CDs for short. Enter Google Analytics. As a tool to measure site traffic, and in turn to assess the effectiveness of a company’s marketing campaigns, GA was unprecedented. In time, its capabilities grew, and GA is still a powerful tool for calculating ROI for advertising spend.

From 2008 onwards tools like KISSmetrics, and Mixpanel, let you see what your users are doing and develop hypotheses about why they are behaving a certain way.

All of the web analytics tools mentioned so far are built on the philosophy of tagging events. Tag managers help with this problem, but they’re only a band-aid on a fundamentally outdated philosophy when it comes to web data collection and data infrastructure. These tools are rooted in the approach that web data collection and analytics needs to have implementation and tagging as the first step.

Today’s web environment is much different. It is no longer a static page with very few interactive elements. It’s dynamic, with the rise of A/B testing and experimentation to personalization. Web analytics tools based on event tagging encounter limitations in today’s dynamic environment.

With the 4th innovation in web analytics, technology can be leveraged to capture all web data for you automatically. Technology like autocapture also organizes all the data for you in a visualization layer, freeing you from tedious tagging and allowing you to spend time slicing and visualizing it any way you need.

Often, the answers to the questions we ask lead us to new questions. If you need data on something you didn’t think to tag six months ago, the web analytics technology should have that available retroactively at your fingertips.

Today, web analytics tools have the capability to track individual user behaviour, analyse user behaviour patterns, and provide insights into how users interact with websites.

Despite the shortcomings of pure web analytic solutions like GA they still have an important place and role to play in your analytics set-up.