Measuring the Web
Web analytics is the collection, measurement, and analysis of website or app usage data. Be careful to not trivialize this as hit counting or visitors, web analytics data when done correctly, is not just a marketing tool — it is operational intelligence that can help developers find errors and performance issues, designers improve aesthetic acceptance and usability, and importantly owners to measure outcomes and insure web efforts maintain economic viability.
Analytics answers the questions you cannot answer just by looking at your own code. They address what happens when users meet the executing code. It could tell us:
- Where do users come from?
- What do real users actually do?
- Where do they struggle?
- What breaks?
- What's slow?
- And maybe even what is unused and needs to go
Analytics can answer these types of questions and more, but be careful not to just collect data and look for insights. We really need to determine our questions first and aim to prove/disprove our beliefs rather than hoping a magical insight emerges from the data.
Questions Analytics Can Answer
Web analytics helps answer questions like:
- How many people visit my site?
- Where do visitors come from?
- What pages are most popular?
- Where do users drop off in checkout flows?
- How fast does my site load for real users?
Three Distinct Purposes
These questions serve three distinct purposes:
- Error tracking and elimination — Finding broken pages, failed requests, JavaScript exceptions, and resource load failures that users never report.
- User behavior monitoring — Understanding what users actually do: which features they use, which paths they take, where they abandon tasks.
- Usability and interest measurement — Determining whether the interface works, whether content resonates, and whether changes improve or degrade the experience.
These three purposes map directly to the three participant groups in any web application: developers care about errors, business stakeholders care about conversions and engagement, and users benefit from a better experience even though they never see the analytics data.