Web Analytics

Web analytics is the branch of analytics that measures a website's visitor behavior — pageviews, sessions, traffic source and navigation — with the session and the page as its base units.

Web analytics is the oldest branch of digital analytics and its unit of analysis is the session and the pageview, not necessarily the user over time; that boundary separates it from product analytics. Web analytics answers “how many visits, from which channel, on which page” excellently, but when the question becomes “does this same user come back next week”, the page-based model falls short and you turn to the event-based model. It has two practical traps: in single-page applications where the URL does not change, pageview counting stays incomplete without proper configuration; and bot traffic, which inflates human stats if not separated. Web analytics and product analytics are not rivals but two complementary layers: one for the traffic-and-channel level, the other for behavioral depth.