What is Web Data?

If you are trying to enter the domain of Web Analytics, then you have caught a big a fish.

Either you pull it up carefully and enjoy the feast or it will pull you down and make you drown in an ocean of data. 

For people who have childhood habit of by-hearting definitions, here is what Web Analytics was defined by Digital Analytics Association. 

“Web Analytics is the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting and analysis of quantitative internet data to optimize websites and web marketing initiatives”

For me, Web Analytics is to understand the online footprint of every Homo sapien, lure them virtually and bring profits to our organization.

 

In a country like India, where you see villages with no proper electricity supply, every house has a mobile phone with wonderful network connectivity and thanks to Karbonn and micromax they also have a high end phone with internet facility. 

Clickstream, Big Data, Web logs, all this refers to the information captured at back end when you type a website on your browser and say go. 

So let’s see what happens when you open up a browser (IE, Mozilla, Chrome and Safari) and type india-forums.com and press enter. 

  

• You click india-forums.com. 
• Your request is sent to one of the servers hosting the pages of india-forums.com
• The server sends back the webpage you requested, but note that this webpage has a javascript code appended to it
• You receive the page on your browser and your browser executes the JS code
• This javascript code collects information like cookie, browser, IP address etc. and sends it back to the server.   
• The server writes this information to a log file and this is used to analyze and improve your web experience
  
  

This is how you end up being stalked with garment ads on every webpage, the day you visit any of the online retail garment store. 

In short, web data is all the data a website owning company can collect from your computer/mobile device, be it about the device or about you. 

So next time you plan to post something on any of the forums or visit a website, be careful there is someone tracking and you might unfortunately end up with some embarrassing advertisements on your other web pages :)