Analytics

Web analytics (often referred to as just analytics) is the measurement of visitor behavior on a website, for the purpose of improving that website. Popular analytics software includes Google Analytics and WebTrends.

Why use analytics?

• Measure your visitors – without an analytics solution, it is impossible to get a reliable indication of how many visitors a website has, and how they behave.
• Improve your goals – analytics allows you to measure and optimize your website for specific goals, such as buying a product or filling in a contact form.
• Available for free – Google Analytics is a highly featured analytics solution that is available for free. Adding basic analytics to a website is a trivial task.

More advanced analytics solutions – like Hotjar – can actually record the behavior of your users and replay it to you like a video. These tools are extremely useful for optimizing your websites and web applications.

Further reading

• Web analytics – Wikipedia