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Web Analytics - What You Always Needed and Could Never Find

In a matter of very few years, the Internet has consolidated itself as a very powerful platform that has changed the way we do business, and the way we communicate. The Internet, as no other medium, has given an international or "global" dimension to the world. It is the universal source of information and became the most democratic of all the mass media. With a very low investment, anyone can have a web page in Internet. This way, almost any business can reach a very large market, directly, fast and economically, no matter the size or its location of the business. With a very low investment almost anybody who can read and write can have access to the World Wide Web.

The Web evolves very quickly. It is now known and confirmed that the world reached a milestone already in late 2005 as Internet access became available to one billion people worldwide, with approximately 845 million using it regularly. In August 2006 there were registered more than 92 millions of domains worldwide and almost 47 millions active websites. Europe with 313 millions of Internet users is on the 2nd place (just after Asia), but the penetration of Internet users in Europe’s population is almost 4 times higher than in Asia and with 38.6 % it is in the 3rd place, after Australia/Oceania (53.5 %) and North America (69.4 %,) on the 1st place.

Together with the Internet expansion the Internet marketing has evolved. Internet marketing is the use of the Internet to advertise and sell goods and services. Web income from advertisements or paid services is proportional to traffic, which can be measured instantly via simple traffic analysis services or more complex tools as web analytics.

Benefits of Web analytics and on-line marketing

Web analytics has evolved into much more than visitor "hits" counter. The new generation of Web analytics is an important resource for assisting customer relationship management, optimizing marketing, increasing sales and measuring site activities that directly affect customer behavior. Analytics reports provide information that allows managers to improve Web activities, eliminate wasted marketing efforts, target new sales customers geographically, support existing customers for repeat business and lifetime loyalty, enhance the site for more efficiency, etc. Web analytics is moving away from IT and into management, sales and marketing.

It is well known that customer satisfaction is critical for business. So take Web analytics reports, analyze the data, apply the conclusions on a consistent basis, and you will be able to pinpoint problem areas, reveal oversights or errors, and correct them. For example, by monitoring variables like visitor click path, page duration and exit pages, a comprehensive report can be formed that will indicate visitor habits directly related to the site pages, from arrival to ratio of use-to-action. With such reports, the site owners or managers gain information needed to make changes or improvements that can positively impact the revenue.

Measuring of internet marketing

Measuring of usage and performance provides important insights on measuring the Return On internet marketing Investments. Measuring the ROI of internet marketing without traffic analysis is like calculating elevator usage without assessing its speed and capacity. If you possess both figures you can compare and may learn that you are not getting enough visitors because the elevator is running out of capacity, is slow or broken. Now imagine it is the only elevator in the department store - how much revenue will be lost because of that? Similarly you can promote your website and acquire more potential clients, but you may also discover that your site is unable to handle such traffic; it is slow or simply not available. According to Zona Research, "more than $21 billion per year lost when users abandon a website because of excessive delays in web page downloads."

Small and mid-sized businesses willing to obtain complete metrics of their website performance have to subscribe both to website monitoring and web statistics services. While a visitor tracking feature together with network and website monitoring service could carry the on-line monitoring service to the next level. This combination could provide unique and valuable source of information to effectively manage online business sites.

There are lots of website and network monitoring services in the market offering mostly similar products and among them there are at least 10 significant companies providing this service. Also there are minimum of 5 important companies among those numerous providers of traffic monitoring service. All of them have common one character - they are specialized just to one of these services.

In the global market, there is one outstanding company!