On the great thing with Internet marketing is the faculty to effectively reach out a target audience and comprehensively analyze the impact assessment of an eMarketing campaign thanks to Web Analytics.
As to the Official WAA Definition, Web Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. For more details, see our glossary dedicated to eMarketing. Generally speaking, Web Analytics can be off-site and on-site.
Off-site Web Analytics refers to web measurement of a website’s potential audience, share of voice (visibility), and buzz (comments) that is happening on the Internet as a whole. Note that it is not necessary to be the actual owner of the website to run such a buzz monitoring.
On-site Web Analytics measure the online performance of a website meaning that it provides detailed analysis of the Internet traffic of visitors on a website. Typically, this data is compared against KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for performance and used to improve a Website or marketing campaign’s audience response.
Google Analytics it the free online web analytics tool offered by Google to generate detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. From my own experience, this solution is one of the most comprehensive and reliable of the market.
I wouls say that understanding one’s core audience and trying to reach it out is the very basic mission of any eMarketer or online communicator. It goes alon with defining objectives and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Thanks to Web Analytics, it is now possible to do it in a very detailed way. Indeed, Web Analytics allow you to analyze the audience of a website and gather strategic insights about its current visitors. Assuming that you are an industry federation dealing with the EU institutions. It will be most likely that you would like to know if EU officials visit your website, read your press releases and download your brochure.