Just as you would measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaign, you need to be aware of what's happening with your website. It's good business practice to measure your return on investment (ROI) for any project, but when it's your virtual shop window, and the first port of call for many potential customers, it's even more important that it's working hard for you.
Web analytics is rapidly evolving into a significant scientific discipline. Finding ways to measure, track, analyse and report on website usage is a challenge, and software developers and Internet experts are constantly looking for new and better ways to give you the best information about how your website is being used. The area is so new that there aren't yet worldwide standard terms or definitions for the many aspects of web analysis out there. What is clear, though, is that for your website to be successful, you need to know who's using it and what they are doing while they're there.
Statisticians have stopped counting how many websites there are, and how many people are using them - the figures are growing so quickly it's impossible to keep track of them. In their haste to become part of the Internet revolution, many companies have bought a domain name and created a site without thinking about how the website is going to work for them. But as companies become more sophisticated about the potential of their website, they want to know where their visitors are coming from, both geographically, and Internet-wise; did they get to the site via a search engine or by linking from another site, or were they looking specifically for that company?
Although web analytics is one of the fastest growing markets in the world, most webmasters are still just asking for the basic information: who is visiting, where have they come from and how are they using the site? These statistics, which can be collected historically or in real-time, give the company a good idea of how their website is being used, which then allows them to alter and improve the site to better serve those visitors or to attract new visitors. Whatever your web ambitions, it's good business practice to know how your resources are being used.