<metaname="description" content="Full Stack Python explains each layer of the web application stack, from the server up through the rendering in a user's browser.">
<p>Web analytics involves collecting, processing, visualizing web data to enable
critical thinking about how users interact with a web application.</p>
<h2>Why is web analytics important?</h2>
<p>User clients, especially web browsers, generate significant data while users
read and interact with webpages. The data provides insight into
how visitors use the site and why they stay or leave. The key concept to
analytics is <em>learning</em> about your users so you can improve your web
application to better suit their needs. </p>
<h2>Web analytics concepts</h2>
<p>It's easy to get overwhelmed at both the number of analytics services and
the numerous types of data points collected. Focus on just a handful of
metrics when you're just starting out. As your application scales and you
understand more about your users add additional analytics services
to gain further insight into their behavior with advanced visualizations such
as heatmaps and action funnels. The
<ahref="http://spenczar.com/posts/2013/Sep/07/seven-stages-analytics-grief/">seven stages of startup analytics grief</a>
post is an amusing read and provides context for how to begin and then grow
tracked metrics over time.</p>
<h3>User funnels</h3>
<p>If your application is
selling a product or service you can ultimately build a
<ahref="http://moz.com/blog/building-your-marketing-funnel-with-google-analytics">user funnel</a> (often called "sales funnel" prior to a user becoming a customer)
to better understand why people buy or don't buy what you're selling. With
a funnel you can visualize drop-off points where visitors leave your
application before taking some action, such as purchasing your service.</p>
<h2>Open source web analytics projects</h2>
<ul>
<li>
<p><ahref="http://piwik.org/">Piwik</a> is a web analytics platform you can host yourself.
Piwik is a solid choice if you cannot use Google Analytics or want to
customize your own web analytics platform.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><ahref="http://www.openwebanalytics.com/">Open Web Analytics</a> is another
self-hosted platform that integrates through a JavaScript snippet that
tracks users' interactions with the webpage.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h2>Hosted web analytics services</h2>
<ul>
<li>
<p><ahref="http://www.google.com/analytics/">Google Analytics</a> is a widely used
free analytics tool for website traffic.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><ahref="https://mixpanel.com/">MixPanel</a>'s analytics platform focuses on mobile
and sales funnel metrics. A developer builds what data points need to be
collected into the server side or client side code. MixPanel captures that
data and provides metrics and visualizations based on the data.</p>
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