If you look at the whole field of web analytics, may find that many of its practitioners are interested in research per se. They seek to understand how people interact with the Internet on an abstract level, at the general rules for predicting human behavior. Their work is often reveals wonderful information about how to interact with people and machines interfaces. Even so, companies should be excluded from a purely scientific research aside and take a pragmatic approach to face the logical analysis.
Part of the objectives of building site, which is meaningful to your overall success. At the beginning of the Internet boom, for example, it was common for the Web channel, which was isolated from the rest of business. Companies never tried to contact the Web site of goals to the crux of the matter. Instead, it should Tout CEOS users and the number of visits, without clarifying the reason for this movement does not matter. In those days, it is not good enough, so this is to talk about. No one was interested in what I mean.
It is clear that this approach is no longer possible. As it has matured, and became the World Wide Web to raise awareness of the main tool for some companies, others, namely the point of contact with customers. People now use the Internet in early to make decisions on where they want to do the work, whether or were not should come to visit the retail store, and whether they would recommend the company of friends and colleagues.
As a result, before they can determine the measurements can be collected on your website, we must understand the objectives of the corporation as a whole. What makes the company successful today? With regard to the participation in long-term profitability and shareholder value? At the same time, you also have to think in what could be detrimental to business in the long run.

For the production of short-term increase in the rates of conversion. But the user end of the day by far the most negative, and even if you understand success in the short term, you will find fewer and fewer customers to return.
What are the objectives of the whole business? If you’re lucky, and the company has already identified and documented. It contains all the key initiatives in the current health situation described by Amman. In most cases, which consists of a number of competing interests in the fabric of one’s mission statement. If the company had already identified its goals, you’re out of a lot of the very beginning.  Just make sure to understand completely. Talk to the largest number of people and gather as much information as you can. Objectives can be vague sometimes, but if you had enough of the questions we ask, should be able to determine what it is.
In some cases, but that even if large firms are not specific in terms of overall objectives, or contact with them in the way that is easily accessible to all its employees. This problem is the scope of this book. Moreover, if the company was not well-defined goals, and the company is likely to be greater problems than the success or failure of web analytics initiatives.
In that case, you need to work together with the right people, including all levels of management to develop specific objectives. Then you can start to work with logical analysis.

Popularity: 91% [?]

A common misconception in the analysis of web sites is that the total number of new visitors and repeat visitors from the total number of visitors. This becomes clear when the guests are considered to be people on a small scale, but caused a significant number of complaints analytical software does not work due to a lack of understanding of statistics.

Here is guilty of a new visitor statistics. In fact, there is no such thing as a new visitor, when considering a place of the current point of view. When a visitor makes his first visit to a specific day and then go back to the spot on the same day and both are new visitors and repeat visitors per day. So, when we look at them as individuals, where are they? The answer is well, that the definition of metric is guilty.

Recent visitor is not an individual, it is the web measurement. For this reason it is easier to conceptualize the same side as the first visit (or first session). This solves the conflict, and thus the confusion. Nobody expected that the number of first add to the number of repeat visitors, the total number of visitors. Statistics will have the same number as the new visitors, but it is clear that it will not be added to this mode.

The day was first elected to the individual us. There was also the second visit to the same person. The number of first visits and the number should be repeated visits to the total number of visits per day.

Popularity: 77% [?]

Web analytics is the process of quantifying the behaviour of a website visitors. Web analytics have become a very important part of electronic commerce because they can show the site owner pages that are effective in persuading people to subscribe to services or purchase products. Web analytics can also be used to monitor and analyze how a site is achieving its objectives.

Web Analytics (also including Controlling Web, Web analysis, data traffic analysis, traffic analysis, clickstream analysis) is the collection and analysis of the behaviour of visitors to Web sites. Typically examines where the visitors come, what areas are visited and how often seen what pages. For professional websites operated this analysis is mainly to optimize the site and to improve the achievement of objectives of the website (such as frequency of visits, propagation of side calls, orders, newsletter subscriptions).

How often to new techniques is also available in the Web Analytics a certain confusion and disagreement on the terms and meanings. For discussions will also always the question of what procedure was used for data collection the best in a particular case or generally. Basic can be found at Web Analytics between evaluation mechanism to measure the permanent site effectiveness and methods to detect weaknesses in the site and possible improvements be made. Worldwide about 150 companies offer professional solutions for Web Analytics. The products the company may be partially or even be installed as an ASP offering (mostly) monthly usage fees without substantial internal hardware or software expenditures used

Web analytics through the analysis of logs
Logfile analysis is an important aspect of web analytics. Using the log file records of web servers, the popularity of a website can be determined. Analysis of web server logs can produce important marketing data such as the number of unique visitors to a site by monitoring the number of times the Web server applications are made by unique users. This has proved to be a powerful tool especially when websites are only composed of a single HTML file. With the influx of pagination multiple Web sites, however, this tool has become less useful and had to be updated with the page and considering visit in order to make it more effective in providing site to view statistics and popularity of information.

The growing popularity of search engines, however, has once again undermined the effectiveness of Web site analysis of log file analysis. This is mainly because the logfile analysis to distinguish between the demands of man and asks visitors to search engine robots and spiders. The difficulty has been compounded by the emergence of new changes as the Internet dynamically assigned IP addresses, Web and Web proxy caches. Logfile analysis successfully adapted to these new innovations somewhat integrating analyzers to exclude cookies and requests for spider.

The advantage of this method of analysis is that Web log files are easier to get that page tags; websites need to make certain changes before the collection of information through page tagging. The logs are also more precise than the tags because they do not require the cooperation of a visitor’s browser. Moreover, locks the page tag programs by its suppliers means that site owners could not easily switch to another method to view the required information while the files are easily compatible with all programs web analytics.

Web Analytics through page tagging
Page marking arose as an analytical tool Web mainly because of the need to resolve the problem created by the Web caches. This method uses Java Script to inform third of a single application server page human visitors. Web analytics firms awarded the visitor a cookie to distinguish it from other visitors and recognize him if he goes again in the future.

The advantage of using tagging Web page as an analytical tool is that it solves the problem of Web cache, collects more information and events that the analysis of newspapers and is even available for companies that do not have their own Web servers.

Both methods of analysis Web, however, may be provided by the companies web analytics so that website owners can obtain the best possible data.

Popularity: 72% [?]

HTTP cookies, or more commonly referred to as Web cookies, tracking cookies or just cookies, are parcels of text sent by a server to a web client (usually a browser) and then sent back unchanged by the client each time it accesses that server. HTTP cookies are used for authenticating, session tracking (state maintenance), and maintaining specific information about users, such as site preferences or the contents of their electronic shopping carts. The term “cookie” is derived from “magic cookie,” a well-known concept in UNIX computing which inspired both the idea and the name of HTTP cookies.

Cookies are subject to a number of misconceptions, mostly based on the erroneous notion that they are computer programs. In fact, cookies are simple pieces of data unable to perform any operation by themselves. In particular, they are neither spyware nor viruses, despite the detection of cookies from certain sites by many anti-spyware products.

Most modern browsers allow users to decide whether to accept cookies, but rejection makes some websites unusable. For example, shopping carts implemented using cookies do not work if cookies are rejected.

History
The term “HTTP cookie” derives from “magic cookie”, a packet of data a program receives but only uses for sending it again, possibly to its origin, unchanged. Magic cookies were already used in computing when Lou Montulli had the idea of using them in Web communications in June 1994. At the time, he was an employee of Netscape Communications, which was developing an e-commerce application for a customer. Cookies provided a solution to the problem of reliably implementing a virtual shopping cart.

Together with John Giannandrea, Montulli wrote the initial Netscape cookie specification the same year. Version 0.9beta of Mosaic Netscape, released on October 13, 1994, supported cookies. The first actual use of cookies (out of the labs) was made for checking whether visitors to the Netscape Web site had already visited the site. Montulli applied for a patent for the cookie technology in 1995; it was granted in 1998. Support for cookies was integrated in Internet Explorer in version 2, released in October 1995.

The introduction of cookies was not widely known to the public, at the time. In particular, cookies were accepted by default, and users were not notified of the presence of cookies. Some people were aware of the existence of cookies as early as the first quarter of 1995,but the general public learned about them after the Financial Times published an article about them on February 12, 1996. In the same year, cookies received lot of media attention, especially because of potential privacy implications. Cookies were discussed in two U.S. Federal Trade Commission hearings in 1996 and 1997.

The development of the formal cookie specifications was already ongoing. In particular, the first discussions about a formal specification started in April 1995 on the www-talk mailing list. A special working group within the IETF was formed. Two alternative proposals for introducing a state in an HTTP transactions had been proposed by Brian Behlendorf and David Kristol, respectively, but the group, headed by Kristol himself, soon decided to use the Netscape specification as a starting point. On February 1996, the working group identified third-party cookies as a considerable privacy threat. The specification produced by the group was eventually published as RFC 2109 in February 1997. It specifies that third-party cookies were either not allowed at all, or at least not enabled by default.

At this time, advertising companies were already using third-party cookies. The recommendation about third-party cookies of RFC 2109 was not followed by Netscape and Internet Explorer. RFC 2109 was followed by RFC 2965 in October 2000.

Popularity: 67% [?]

Images or other objects contained in a Web page may reside in servers different from the one holding the page. In order to show such a page, the browser downloads all these objects, possibly receiving cookies. These cookies are called third-party cookies if the server sending them is located outside the domain of the Web page.

This condition is common with on-line advertisement. Indeed, web banners are typically stored in servers of the advertising company, which are not in the domain of the Web pages showing them. If third-party cookies are not rejected by the browser, an advertising company can track a user across the sites where it has placed a banner. In particular, whenever a user views a page containing a banner, the browser retrieves the banner from a server of the advertising company. If this server has previously set a cookie, the browser sends it back, allowing the advertising company to link this access with the previous one. By choosing a unique banner URL for every Web page where it is placed or by using the HTTP referer field, the advertising company can then find out which pages the user has viewed. The same technique can be used with web bugs. These, unlike the obvious banners, are images embedded in the Web page that are undetectable by the user (e.g. they are tiny and/or transparent)

Third-party cookies are used to create an anonymous profile of the user. This allows the advertising company to select the banner to show to a user based on the user’s profile. The advertising industry has denied any other use of these profiles.

Many modern browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera block third party cookies if requested by the user. Internet Explorer version 6 allows a mild form of blocking, called leashing. A leashed cookie is a third-party cookie that is sent by the browser only when accessing a third-party document via the same first-party. For example, if third.com sets a cookie when an image is requested, and this cookie is set for the first time when the user views a document from first.com, the same cookie is not sent if the user downloads a document that contains the same image but the document is on another site other.com, if the cookie is leashed. A leashed cookie is different from a blocked cookie in that it is sent, in this example, if the image is contained in another document from the same site first.com

Popularity: 67% [?]