Web Analytics provides you with insights on your website traffic and usage patterns through interpretation of data.
It is commonly used for commercial purposes to monitor marketing performance. Web Analytics is not just statistics; it is the use of statistics to tell you if what you are doing is working, and why.
For example, web statistics tells you that your web traffic doubled in a week but it is web analytics that tells you where your traffic came from.
If you just advertised on a website and realized that none of the traffic came from there, you should rethink if advertising on that site is a good idea. On the other hand, if it did bring traffic to your website, you can also assess if advertising at that website gave you an acceptable conversion rate – The ratio of visitors who performed the desired actions planned by you, such as purchasing a product.
Web Analytics tells you which page visitors landed on, how long they spent on each page, which page they exited from and which page they performed an action, such as purchasing a product or filling out a form. It is also able to predict trends and tell you how your traffic would grow and which audiences you should target.
The screenshot below is taken from gostats.com, showing some of the basic information web analytics can tell you.
Popular sites that provide web analytics are Technorati (For blogs), Google Analytics, Yahoo! Web Analytics, Compete and Sitemeter.
