Three Important steps of online Business

Online marketing can be divided into three key activities:


• Acquisition Getting people to your Web site or landing page, Try to give what your visitor want on this page.

• Conversion Persuading them to take the desired action(s), for what we are working. Most important part of online business

• Retention Deepening the relationship and increasing its lifetime value or we can say thanks for visit and please do come back soon.

Each step feeds into the next.

Imagine that you are in charge of online marketing for your organization. You have slaved for months to tune and optimize your campaigns. Countless hours and days have passed in a blur.

The first visitor arrives — and leaves in half a second. The next one lands on your site, clicks another link, and is gone as well. More and more visitors flash by — a virtual flood. Yet only a tiny percentage will take the action that you would like them to take.
What's wrong?
It's hard to figure it out:
• You have their fleeting attention for a split second.
• You don't know who they are.
• You don't know what they are thinking or feeling.
• You don't know why the vast majority of them leave so soon, empty-handed.
It seems like a hopeless situation. You are forever doomed to suffer from the poor marketing program economics that result from a low Web site conversion rate.

To overcome this type of situation the Proper Tracking and behavior analysis comes in light and try to deliver what visitor want , Try to follow their step see what made them to exit . Unlike in shopping mall where we can see our customer live and analyze their behavior and also we can offer on the spot help to them if they want and we can stop them hold them but in case of online business we can not have this facility, but with good web analytics software we can do tracking and recording of every interaction with your Web site. Each visit is recorded along with a mind-numbing amount of detailed information. Reports can tell you where the visitors came from, their path through your site, the time that they spent lingering over certain content and whether they were persuaded to act.

Web Analytics technologies

There are two main technological approaches to collecting web analytics data. The first method, logfile analysis, reads the logfiles in which the web server records all its transactions. The second method, page tagging, uses JavaScript on each page to notify a third-party server when a page is rendered by a web browser.

Web server logfile analysis
Web servers have always recorded all their transactions in a logfile. It was soon realised that these logfiles could be read by a program to provide data on the popularity of the website. Thus arose web log analysis software.
In the early 1990s, web site statistics consisted primarily of counting the number of client requests (or hits) made to the web server. This was a reasonable method initially, since each web site often consisted of a single HTML file. However, with the introduction of images in HTML, and web sites that spanned multiple HTML files, this count became less useful. The first true commercial Log Analyzer was released by IPRO in 1994

Two units of measure were introduced in the mid 1990s to gauge more accurately the amount of human activity on web servers. These were page views and visits (or sessions). A page view was defined as a request made to the web server for a page, as opposed to a graphic, while a visit was defined as a sequence of requests from a uniquely identified client that expired after a certain amount of inactivity, usually 30 minutes. The page views and visits are still commonly displayed metrics, but are now considered rather unsophisticated measurements.

The emergence of search engine spiders and robots in the late 1990s, along with web proxies and dynamically assigned IP addresses for large companies and ISPs, made it more difficult to identify unique human visitors to a website. Log analyzers responded by tracking visits by cookies, and by ignoring requests from known spiders.

The extensive use of web caches also presented a problem for logfile analysis. If a person revisits a page, the second request will often be retrieved from the browser's cache, and so no request will be received by the web server. This means that the person's path through the site is lost. Caching can be defeated by configuring the web server, but this can result in degraded performance for the visitor to the website.

Page tagging
Concerns about the accuracy of logfile analysis in the presence of caching, and the desire to be able to perform web analytics as an outsourced service, led to the second data collection method, page tagging or 'Web bugs'.
In the mid 1990s, Web counters were commonly seen — these were images included in a web page that showed the number of times the image had been requested, which was an estimate of the number of visits to that page. In the late 1990s this concept evolved to include a small invisible image instead of a visible one, and, by using JavaScript, to pass along with the image request certain information about the page and the visitor. This information can then be processed remotely by a web analytics company, and extensive statistics generated.
The web analytics service also manages the process of assigning a cookie to the user, which can uniquely identify them during their visit and in subsequent visits.

With the increasing popularity of Ajax-based solutions, an alternative to the use of an invisible image, is to implement a call back to the server from the rendered page. In this case, when the page is rendered on the web browser, a piece of Ajax code would call back to the server and pass information about the client that can then be aggregated by a web analytics company. This is in some ways flawed by browser restrictions on the servers which can be contacted with XmlHttpRequest objects.

Logfile analysis vs page tagging

Both logfile analysis programs and page tagging solutions are readily available to companies that wish to perform web analytics. In many cases, the same web analytics company will offer both approaches. The question then arises of which method a company should choose. There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach.
Advantages of logfile analysis
The main advantages of logfile analysis over page tagging are as follows.
• The web server normally already produces logfiles, so the raw data is already available. To collect data via page tagging requires changes to the website.
• The web server reliably records every transaction it makes. Page tagging relies on the visitors' browsers co-operating, which a certain proportion may not do (for example, if JavaScript is disabled).
• The data is on the company's own servers, and is in a standard, rather than a proprietary, format. This makes it easy for a company to switch programs later, use several different programs, and analyze historical data with a new program. Page tagging solutions involve vendor lock-in.
• Logfiles contain information on visits from search engine spiders. Although these should not be reported as part of the human activity, it is important data for performing search engine optimization.
• Logfiles contain information on failed requests; page tagging only records an event if the page is successfully viewed.

Advantages of page tagging
The main advantages of page tagging over logfile analysis are as follows.
• The JavaScript is automatically run every time the page is loaded. Thus there are fewer worries about caching.
• It is easier to add additional information to the JavaScript, which can then be collected by the remote server. For example, information about the visitors' screen sizes, or the price of the goods they purchased, can be added in this way. With logfile analysis, information not normally collected by the web server can only be recorded by modifying the URL.
• Page tagging can report on events which do not involve a request to the web server, such as interactions within Flash movies.
• The page tagging service manages the process of assigning cookies to visitors; with logfile analysis, the server has to be configured to do this.
• Page tagging is available to companies who do not run their own web servers.

Economic factors
Logfile analysis is almost always performed in-house. Page tagging can be performed in-house, but it is more often provided as a third-party service. The economic difference between these two models can also be a consideration for a company deciding which to purchase.
• Logfile analysis typically involves a one-off software purchase; however, some vendors are introducing maximum annual page views with additional costs to process additional information.
• Page tagging most often involves a monthly fee, although some vendors offer installable page tagging solutions with no additional page view costs.
Which solution is cheaper often depends on the amount of technical expertise within the company, the vendor chosen, the amount of activity seen on the web sites, the depth and type of information sought, and the number of distinct web sites needing statistics.

Resource:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_analytics

Top Web Analytics Blogs

The Web changes all the time, and those changes create pain points on how best to accurately andconsistently analyze our websites. One of the most awesome resources at your disposal is the blogsof various industry luminaries and practitioners who unselfishly put out some of the best contentyou’ll find anywhere. A key characteristic of most of these blogs is that they are extremely currentand on the cutting edge in their discussions. Get an RSS (really simple syndication) reader and soak up all the information—it’s free!
Google Analytics Blog This official blog of the GA team has loads of great GA tips and insights.
Occam’s Razor (Avinash Kausik Blog) : blog focuses on web research and analytics.
Web Analytics Demystified : Eric Peterson is an author, conference speaker, and Visual Sciences VP, and on his blog he shares his wisdom about all things web analytics.
Lies, Damned Lies…. (http://www.liesdamnedlies.com):
Ian Thomas is the Director of Customer Intelligence at Microsoft, and in a prior life helped found
WebAbacus, a web analytics company. Ian applies his deep experience and covers complex topics inan easy-to-understand language.
Analytics Talk (http://epikone.com/blog/): Justin Cutroni is one of the smartest web analytics
practitioners and consultants around.His focus is on GA, but he has lots of non-GA stuff as well.
Commerce360 Blog (http://blogs.commerce360.com/): Craig Danuloff is the president of
Commerce360, a consulting company, and he brings a refreshingly honest perspective on all thingsweb analytics and marketing.
LunaMetrics Blog (http://lunametrics.blogspot.com/): Robbin Steif provides practical
tips and tricks on getting the most out of your web analytics tools, specifically with an eye toward
improving your conversion rate.
Instant Cognition (http://blog.instantcognition.com/): Clint Ivy calls himself a data
visualization journeyman—that says it all! Clint shares his perspective on analytics with a focus
on visual report design.
Applied Insights Blog (http://snipurl.com/neilmason/): Neil Mason and John McConnell
share their insights from the United Kingdom. I have known Neil for some time now, and he shares absolutely invaluable insights.
OX2 Blog (http://webanalytics.wordpress.com): René Dechamps Otamendi and Aurélie
Pols run the pan-European OX2, and their blog always has wonderfully insightful perspectives on web analytics.