Web Analytics vs Data Analytics
Data analytics allows companies to collect, analyze and use data to make informed decisions and improve business performance. It helps to discover new opportunities and market trends. Overall, data analytics enables companies to gain a greater understanding of their customers and their business, which can lead to significant competitive advantages.
This article will explore the definitions of Web Analytics and Data Analytics and the corresponding benefits of using them.
Contents
Introduction
If you don’t know the traffic statistics of your site and your online channels, you lack important information to know how to implement the best strategy for your business. In other words, many businesses, without collecting and interpreting the right data, waste time and money, and don’t even realize it.
An example of indispensable information to improve your digital strategies:
- From which source does most of the traffic come?
- How many users return to visit the site?
- From which geographical area does the majority of traffic come?
- Which page of the site is the most visited?
- From which device is the most used by my users?
- What area of the site needs improvement?
- On which day of the week are there the most visits?
Before we do anything else, here is a formal definition of Web Analytics and Data Analytics.
Web Analytics
Web Analytics is the set of techniques and methodologies used to collect, analyze and interpret the data generated by user activities on a website. Using this data, analysts can better understand how users interact with a website, identify any problems or opportunities for optimization, and make informed decisions to improve website performance.
Web Analytics focuses on several areas, including:
- Site traffic: analysis of the number of visitors, page views, traffic sources and bounce rates.
- User behaviour: analysis of user actions on the website, such as pages visited, links clicked and forms filled out.
- Conversions: Analysis of user actions that lead to a conversion, such as a purchase or signup.
- Performance Analysis: Analysis of website performance, such as page loading speed and troubleshooting for technical issues.
Web Analytics uses various technologies to collect data, including cookies, tracking tags and analytics software. Collected data can be viewed in reports and dashboards to allow easy interpretation and use of the information.
Main uses:
- Analyze user visits.
- Analyze traffic in real time.
- Evaluate technical performance.
- Optimize the conversion process.
- Optimize user behavior.
- Improve navigation of a site.
Data Analytics
Data Analytics is the set of techniques and methodologies used to collect, analyze and interpret large amounts of data to extract useful information to support business decisions and improve performance. Data analytics focuses on extracting insights from large volumes of data, also called “big data,” from a variety of sources, such as business systems, social media, sensors, and mobile applications.
Data Analytics is used in many applications, including:
- Business Intelligence: data analysis to support business decisions and identify new business opportunities.
- Predictive: The use of machine learning algorithms and statistics to predict future events and identify trends.
- Geographic data analysis: to visualize information on a map and identify relationships between data and places.
- Analysis of text data: such as social media posts or documents, to extract useful information.
- Analysis of image data: such as photos or videos, to extract useful information.
Knowing how to handle data is a priority not only to optimize processes, but also to develop new products, services and above all to adopt effective strategies.
Web Analytics vs Data Analytics
Web analytics specifically focuses on analyzing data generated by online activities, such as website traffic, user actions, traffic sources and conversions. It uses tools such as Google Analytics to collect and analyze website data.
Data analytics is a broader discipline that focuses on the acquisition, processing, modeling and visualization of data for business purposes. It may include using statistical, machine learning, and visualization methods to analyze data from different sources, not just the web, such as business transactions, demographics, social data, and sensory data.
In summary, web analytics is a subset of data analytics, focused only on website data.
Conclusions
To set up truly effective strategies, it is important to analyze in detail all the digital channels used by the business activity. This allows you to better understand how users interact with your business and various digital channels, identify any issues or opportunities for optimization, and make informed decisions to improve channel and business performance.
Setting up and connecting a Data Analytics platform to your site is the first step in understanding how users respond to your online activities. To set up effective strategies, it is necessary to analyze in detail all the digital channels used. The analysis of digital channels allows you to identify the channels that work best and invest more in them. This allows you to optimize the use of budgets and maximize the return on investment.
If you need more information, book an appointment in the Contacts section. It will be a pleasure to provide you useful information for your business.
You may be interested in reading how the technology used by Google’s Analytics platform works read the article Google Analytics Generations.
Published by Nicola Lapenta
Credits Google Support, Blog Avinash Kaushik, Wikipedia.
Photo by Stephen Dawson on Unsplash
