Imagine running an online business and not knowing anything about how your customers use your website. How would you know which products were selling? How would you know which content draws people to your website? How would you know how effective your advertising campaigns were?
Web analytics is information. It helps you understand and measure:
How many people visit your website
Which pages visitors look at, and how often
Which devices visitors use to look at your site
How much time visitors spend on your website
What your most popular content is
How people find your site
Track specific and important events (like a form fill, a subscription, a download, or a purchase)
And much more
How do web analytics work?
Most analytics providers require you add a small amount of code to your website. This is a fairly trivial task for any developer. The code allows the website owner to track the information outlined in the list above.
Analytics can provide a website owner with a lot of information. Usually, this takes the form of charts, tables, and graphs, presented in a dashboard.
There are many website analytics products available. However, most analytics platforms are also quite difficult to master. It’s easy to:
Be overwhelmed with the amount of information
Have difficulty setting up reports the way you want
Make use of the data available
What makes Silktide Analytics different?
Silktide Analytics is designed around respecting user privacy. There are no cookies or personally-identifiable data, so you’ll comply with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR while still getting comprehensive behavioral and heatmap data. We also made it super easy for everyone to understand, even if they’ve never used an analytics platform before.
Privacy concerns and cookie-based tracking
Most analytics solutions require cookies. You’ve probably heard of them. They’re small pieces of code that live in your web browser, and they communicate information with the organization that set them. For example, if Google sets a cookie in your browser, it can track information about your web browsing activity not just on the website itself, but on every website on which Google Analytics is stored.
Google Analytics v3 uses personally-identifiable user data to track and advertise to your web visitors. In today’s regulated, privacy-conscious world, businesses and organizations need to be aware of how they collect, store and transmit user information. This has privacy implications, and it’s why laws exist like GDPR, which govern the collection of personal data and its subsequent transfer out of the EU.