Web analytic tools

The international crisis shows to corporations how important it is to increase sales also on the internet. That does not mean that they have to sell their products by online order but to raise the awareness amongst (potential) costumers via digital channels. So if an organisation has established a homepage it is necessary to analyse different issues to evaluate the settings.

Thus, it may be useful to know where the visitors come from, how they found the page and for how long time stay stayed on the site. For example, if many visitors clicked but only stayed for a very short time it can be an indicator that the homepage of the corporation is not attractive as it does not stream visitors in special directions or it may be even confusing so that they leave the page. Therefore it can be important to change the arrangements of the page to keep visitors for a longer time.

StatCounter or Google analytics are such tools and they compete to each other; they help corporate users to get statistical and graphical information about different variables between website and visitors. It indicates from where the visitors came over the IP address which is presented in a global map, it shows the loyalty of the visitors and gives the possibility to compare different terms to each other.

In my opinion this tool is very helpful for organisations as they can analyse the relationship between homepage, visitors, their provided service in relation to made sales in a specific term. But the indicated maps, graphs and statistics which Google analytics presents helps and is useful only if the corporate responsible person is able to evaluate the data correctly; otherwise it may more push their egos! However, if the data can be analysed correctly and changes are made in the relevant unit in the corporation the tool may help to ameliorate the web presence and increase sales.

But Google analytics has also some disadvantages. For example it offers this service up to 5 million clicks per page for free which leads to the assumption that Google uses the collected data of visitors for internal purposes. Another disadvantage especially for corporations is the fact that they have to give Google some of their data which increases the danger for abuse of the collected data of visitors. Also the risk is not completely excluded that competitors may receive the data somehow. Further, every visitor has to use JavaScript so that Google analytics is able to involve him in the statistics; if users should have deactivated JavaScript they were not counted which may distort the data.

Not only corporations can use Google analytics but also private persons for their homepages or blogs, so did I! Evaluating my data is not so easy! At the first sight all the graphs and statistics indicated are quite impressing but on the second one I can see that the biggest part of the visitors spent only less than 10 seconds on my blog – how depressing! But reflecting about this fact I come to the conclusion that it was me perhaps the most time, checking out changes I made on the blog settings. Whereby I don’t know if Google analytics counts my own visits or not. Provided it was not me, I should maybe improve the layout and chose more interesting topics! However, analysing the data does not really say something, without having a comparison to other blog visits. So, I cannot say if my click rate is high or low as I don’t have a reference size.


Hoping that my visitors enjoy my blog and stay in the average more than 4 minutes I finish at this point!