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Web Analytics

Web Analytics solutions are probably the most common solution we see at our customers. With Web Analytics in place you can gain valuable insights about your website visitor or app users. There are many types and sizes of Analytics solutions like:

  • Google Analytics
  • Snowplow Analytics
  • Piwik Pro
  • Mixpanel

These solutions range from free to paid, and can be open-source or SaaS or sometimes even both. Many Web Analytics solutions offer API’s for access to data.

Challenges data extraction from Web Analytics

Most solutions provide an accessible, online Web Analytics interface that gives you insight into the performance of your website. The data that you can collect with Web Analytics can be classified into 4 main categories:

  • data about your website visitors,
  • data about the marketing channels through which visitors come to your website,
  • the behavior that visitors show on your site, and
  • the goals and transactions that visitors on your website achieve.

Some of this data is collected out-of-the-box. Think of the number of visitors, sessions and pageviews on your website. It is as simple as placing a tracking script on all pages of your website. This enables you to analyse, for instance, your best and worst content pages in terms of traffic. But this data is commonly put in predefined reports and is often non-granular or sampled. This makes it difficult to combine the data with data from other cans like your eCommerce or Marketing solutions. And thus getting answers on questions like how do your most-visited pages contribute to your overall site goals? Where do the visitors on these pages come from? How do they consume your content and how do they interact with your forms? And do they convert in the near future?
The crux is that data needs to be translated into insights in order to make more well-informed decisions. And the good news is – we can help you with that!

Creating insights from your Web Analytics data

The data you collect with Web Analytics such as Google Analytics, you can not only access through the online user interface, but also through the API. This makes it possible to use the data from Google Analytics in our SmartDataPack. For dozens of customers we have created insights from Google Analytics in Klipfolio, Tableau and Looker combined with data from internal systems, eCommerce Platforms or ERPs.

An alternative for, or complement to, Google Analytics is Snowplow Analytics. This also collects data about your website and its users. However, Snowplow differs significantly from Google on a number of points.

  1. Snowplow collects more granular data. This means that the data collected with Snowplow is more detailed. While Google Analytics is particularly suitable for analyzing trends in your data, Snowplow is more suitable for performing analyses on an individual visitor level.
  2. Snowplow does not sample your data.
  3. Snowplow uses a data pipeline on the infrastructure of Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform, of which you are the owner. This way you are the owner of the data and you have control over what happens to your data.
  4. Snowplow requires you to determine which fields need to be collected in a so-called ‘scheme’. The purpose of this is to ensure that the data is collected in a consistent way. Does the data you send to Snowplow not comply with the schedule? Then this piece of data cannot be processed. That is why we call this a ‘bad row’. The advantage of Snowplow is that such a bad row can still be processed retroactively so that data loss is prevented.

Whereas the advantages of Snowplow are huge, Snowplow requires more technical knowledge for building your own data infrastructure and SQL knowledge to get insights from the data. At i-spark we have the technical knowledge and experience to build a robust data infrastructure to help your business move forward.

Tag Management Systems

Also, to collect better data we can implement another can to your pack, which is a so-called TMS (tag management system) such as Google Tag Manager, Relay42 and Piwik PRO.

A TMS should be considered a gateway that transmits data from your website to the various tools you work with. In addition to Google Analytics, these can include your advertising tools. Also, using a TMS you can activate scripts that meet a specific condition, e.g. cookie consent given for a specific purpose. Since a TMS allows for the specification of conditions that should hold for a script to be activated or a user interaction to be tracked, it enables us to collect data that is exactly tailored to your business needs – without developers’ intervention. Think of any of the following:

  • filtering employees out of the data
  • setting up the data collection in a privacy-friendly manner
  • adding events relevant to your business
  • adding variables relevant to your business
  • measuring the different steps within a so-called single-page application
  • adding goals that are relevant to your business
  • implementing Enhanced Ecommerce
  • linking your web data to offline data
  • linking Google Analytics to Search Console or Google Ads

Questions/contact

Would you like to know more about how we can help you distill insights from your data?
We are happy to help!

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