What is Analytics?

Collection, measurement, reporting of our web data.

So who is an analyst?  Just think like that whenever you want to go and get a gift for your spouse we try to go ahead and reflect our historical conversation with them, what kind of things that they need, what kind of colour they like and then we try to go and pick gift accordingly.

Similarly, somebody who can actually go and look to our historical data someone who goes and draws insights of that data, and then act on those insights now your action can be right or wrong but they would be better than if you actually go and randomly do something.

Why do we need all these tools like google analytics, SAS, R, big data, etc. because data is so humongous the data is just too much right now. It will help us to analyze the data.

(i) AVERAGE DURATION SHOULD INCREASE

(ii) PAGES/ SESSION SHOULD INCREASE

(iii) RETURN USERS SHOULD INCREASE

So again the question comes how this data made how all the company knows about our requirement?

Information on the internet travels in the form of small data packets, they are very small data packets which are mainly from one system to another system.

This is the data packets which are coming from my system and going to another server. Now, this data packets structurally are very similar to the postcards that we are used to posting.

Postcards used to have space for a stamp, space for receivers add, senders address, message and all.

Similarly like that in every data packets we certain headers. These headers contain information like:

(i) OS

(ii) IP ADDRESS

(iii) OS VERSION

(iv) BROWSER

(v) BROWSER VERSION

(vi) SCREEN HEIGHT

(vii) SCREEN WIDTH

(viii) LANGUAGE

All this information is impeded with this data packets and these headers are mandatory to fill with every data packets. It means when I open flipkart.com data packets from my system will go to Flipkart webservers.

It means Flipkart will know about my all above details.

HITS

For understanding hits, we take an example like:

What is the core products of Flipkart?

They sell a market place it is a digital mall they provide a platform for sellers and buyers to come together and do their transactions that is their core products or markets.

So, similarly, FK.COM core competency is not analytics their core company is to create a platform, therefore, they implement a tool like Google Analytics or web analytics.

Which help them to track user activity and present meaningful reports.

To implement WA solutions they put a code, javascript, snippet on each and every page that they want to track. This code creates a 1*1 pixels image on each page.

This image is transparent so you can’t see it. It is placed on the top right corner of their webpage but is stored on the GA server.

Now GA server can analyze all this data and present to us in meaningful reports. Every time we send a request for this GA image to GA servers is called a hit/interactions/page view/image request.

SESSIONS

Collection of hits till the time a session expires and session expires under three conditions:

1. After 30 min of Inactivity

Let’s say I went to flipkart.com page A from the chrome of my laptop at 1:00 PM, then I went to FK.COM Page B from the chrome of my laptop at 1:10. In this case.

Inactivity: 10 mins

Hits: 2

Sessions: 1 (because of the inactivity period of 10 min)

Let’s take another example

I went to fk.com page c from chrome of my laptop at 1:35 pm

Inactivity: 25 min

Hits: 3

Sessions: 1

I shut down my system at 1:40 pm come back from the market at 1:50 restored my system and next to page A of fk.com from the chrome of my laptop at 2:00

Inactivity: 25 min

Hits: 4

Sessions: 1

It means shutting down of my system has no impact on my GA session.

2. When the Source is Changed

I go to fk.com by clicking on TOI banner source of the session is TOI.com @ 1:00.

I go to fk.com by clicking on an email campaign link at 1:20 pm same mail.

Hits: 2

Session: 2

3. After Midnight

Go to fk.com page A from the chrome of my laptop at 11:55 pm.

I went to fk.com page B from the chrome of my laptop at 12:02 am.

Hits: 2

Sessions: 2

USERS

Visitors who are coming on our digital platform user within GA is identified by the help of client ID.

IF I go to fk.com from chrome for the first time GA will check if I have a client ID.

No, because it will allocate a client ID, store it in a cookie and drop that cookie in my system 123456. If next day I come back to fk.com using my laptop GA will check if I have a client ID every time is stored in the cookie.

COOKIE: small computers program, designed to store a specific value for a certain period of time. In case of GA cookie lasts for 2years cookie are always browser-based stored on the local system.

BOUNCE & BOUNCE RATE

BOUNCE:  that session where we have only 1 hit.

BOUNCE RATE: TOTAL BOUNCE/TOTAL SESSIONS *100

                                   High bounce rate good for business is not good.

Retail Company: more than 40% not good

Less than 10-15% means you are doing something wrong

Less than 30% good

Banks: 25-30%

Blogs: 80-90 %

WRAPPING UP

This blog is about the basic of google analytics I cover this because in the field of web analytics google analytics tools plays a very important role. so that this blog gives you the basic idea about google analytics. How it uses in research filed we learn in further blogs.