Use of Web Analytics in Portals

Abstract

Web analytics are typically branded as a tool for measuring website traffic. They can be equally used as a tool for business research, results of advertising campaigns, and market research. Web analytics provide data on the number of visitors, page views, measure a visitor’s navigation through a website, etc. This collection of data is typically compared against some metrics to indicate whether the web site is delivering expected values, what improvements should be considered, and so on. These metrics are also used to improve a web site or marketing campaign’s audience response. Tracking portal visits are important in order to obtain a better understanding of which parts of the portal are delivering value. However, portals have unique attributes associated with the page composition techniques, page, and portlet refresh. Portal always presents multiple topics on the same page, which pose specific challenges to explore exciting opportunities allowing the web designer to gain insights about portal usage and user behaviour. Furthermore, portals are inherently multidimensional, and effective tools to monitor and analyse portal data usage must be able to support multidimensional analysis.