The history of web analytics

When the Internet was born in 1991, web analysis was very basic and not possible in real time.

You may remember seeing one of those counters that said “You are the 15,614th visitor to our website” or something like that. The list of things we could measure, with some degree of accuracy, was rather small. Web strategists of the time were shooting arrows in the dark. That’s why what we now call the “Internet boom of the 90s” was really a blind gold rush. If you somehow found traffic, you had found gold. Valuable content and without proper promotion and optimized visibility, your website could lead you to ruin.

The year 1993 brought what IT professionals, marketers and web strategists know as web analytics, then WebTrends, the first web analytics tool that shaped the concept of what we now call the user.

It was designed to track records and analyze user behavior on the Internet.

It was not just a pioneering act in software, but a shift to a totally new philosophy or paradigm in our idea of what the Internet is, should be, and can be. This change was to focus on the user, their experience, recording their activity, understanding their behavior and creating strategies by analyzing their relationship with websites. This single thought or idea is what will later become the basis of the field of web analytics. So 1993 was, in a sense, the year that the basic technology14 and philosophical underpinnings of Web analysis entered the global Internet community.

Originally, web analytics was a subfield of the computer industry. But it didn’t take long before marketers, traders and business people, financial consultants, web strategists and now more specifically SEO professionals, realized the wealth of usefulness, insights and possibilities that web analytics offered. If you’re talking about web analytics in the early 1990s, marketing or business didn’t have it in their dictionaries. Web analytics has evolved over time to become a field in its own right and a specialization that requires specific knowledge, training and skills. specific knowledge, background and skills.

Perhaps the earliest form of Web analytics was basic log files, which at the time had no marketing or business value or context, and were merely a resource owned and maintained by the IT departments of companies or organizations. It’s hard to say when, where and how, but somewhere along the line, marketing departments began to see the potential opportunities these log files offered to understand consumer behavior. However, it goes without saying that at the time, there was not much information or in-depth research on the contents of these log files.

Nevertheless, the point is that the link has been made between commerce and the archiving of user activity on the Web. user activity on the web. This was a natural win-win discovery and a boon to marketing and research, instead of traditional market research, where the company must literally hound the consumer for information and be careful not to annoy potential customers. Here, with user behavior analysis on the Internet, you essentially had your consumers under a microscope, a framework that was, for the most part, controlled and composed of precisely adjustable variables. precisely adjustable variables. All consumer activity was archived by default and there was no need for strategies to bait the consumer into giving you time and information, since the mere presence of a user on the web generated data.

The next big development in the history of web analytics came with the help of JavaScript. and it was a little something called page markup. It’s quite simple and ingenious. The page allows an analyst to know if a user is a new or frequent visitor, where they came from and where they go when they leave the site.

where they came from and where they were going when they left the site, which parts of the page they hovered over the most and other similar examples. Essentially, page tagging described the interaction between websites and their visitors. the interaction between websites and their visitors.

In fact, ideas of this nature have had a major impact on web design and content development.

Marketing was not the only candidate for the progression of web analytics. of web analytics. Web analytics was beginning to be understood as the way the Internet looks at itself. a virtual mirror that could be customized according to the analyst’s needs. the analyst. These early advances in web analytics were indirectly responsible for, or at least contributed to, the birth of user-friendly tools. s user-friendly and user-centric development philosophy, which is making a strong comeback since the implementation of Google’s strategy. a strong comeback since the Panda and Penguin updates from Google.

By the mid-1990s, web analytics had created a niche for itself and had become part of the global R&D agenda, at least as far as the big IT giants were concerned. Web analytics has become the new frontier of the big data revolution and a new toy for marketers – a famous marketing guru on Madison Avenue is quoted as saying, “The net has changed everything, we used to chase people to ask them their favorite color, age, etc.

we used to run after them to ask them their favorite color, now they come to us and tell us where they were last night! last night!”

It was around this time, in the summer of 1995, that what would later become known as Google Analytics, appeared in the cyber world, in the form of a software program called URCHIN. The year 1995 is highly underrated for its importance in the history of marketing, e-commerce, web analytics and the Internet as a whole. Although URCHIN was not acquired, redesigned and renamed as Google Analytics until 2005, a decade later, history had already been made that summer.

URCHIN was made available free of charge to anyone who had a website and once injected into the cyber blood system, it changed the world of the internet (WWW) for good. Thus, more than 90% of page views are tracked, archived and analyzed, whereas only 30% of partial tracking and reading was done before URCHIN.

The late 1990s and early 2000s saw the official rise of big data and the integration of web analytics into four major industries: marketing, information technology, online publishing and, last but not least, e-commerce. What started out as a simple counter to measure how many people put their cursor on a website has become one of the most refined and sophisticated practices sought after by all businesses, large and small.

Here is the first design of Google Analytics, which replaced the URCHIN in 2005

After reviewing the history of web analytics, let’s take a brief look at the practical side of things and how web analytics can help you if you are a business or organization. things, and how web analytics can help you if you are a business or organization.