Website analytics guides to understand visitors, sessions and direct traffic, separate signal from noise and make decisions with data you can explain.
What an analytics SaaS tool is, how it compares with self-hosted analytics and which criteria to use when choosing one, from privacy and data ownership to pricing and multi-site support.
There are several kinds of analytics tools, and each answers a different question. See what they are, when each one makes sense and how to avoid paying for data nobody uses.
What data analytics SaaS tools are, which types exist and how small and mid-sized companies can put together a lean set of cloud analytics without paying for things they won't use.
Direct traffic is not just people typing your address. Learn what really ends up in this group, why it can grow suddenly and how to make it smaller and more useful.
What tracking visitors actually involves, which numbers to start with, how to install a tracking script and the mistakes that make your data unreliable.
Website analytics is the part of the job that turns loose numbers into answers. How many people visited the site, where they came from, what they did once they arrived and what changed since last month. The articles in this category explain how to collect that data reliably and, above all, how to read it without jumping to conclusions.
We cover concepts that often cause confusion, such as the difference between visitors and sessions, what really ends up in direct traffic and why two reports for the same period sometimes show different numbers. The goal is for you to finish each article knowing what to look at in your own dashboard, whatever tool you use.
They're written for people who look after one or more websites and have to report on results: small business owners, marketers, agencies and freelancers. You don't need to know how to code. When a topic requires a technical step, such as installing a tracking snippet, we explain why before showing how.
Start with the article on how to track website visitors, which lays the groundwork for everything else. Then read about direct traffic to understand one of the most misread numbers in any report. As you apply what you learn, write down the date of every change you make to the site. Without that record, it's hard to tell later whether a shift in traffic came from your work or from something else.
That memory is exactly what WEBPilot organizes: you register your websites and log, with dates, the strategies applied to each one. See how traffic analytics works in WEBPilot.
