Web analytics is the process of analyzing the behavior of visitors to a website. This involves tracking, reviewing and reporting data to measure web activity, including the use of a website and its components, such as webpages, images and videos.

Data collected through web analytics may include traffic sources, referring sites, page views, paths taken and conversion rates. The compiled data often forms a part of customer relationship management analytics (CRM analytics) to facilitate and streamline better business decisions.

Web analytics enables a business to retain customers, attract more visitors and increase the dollar volume each customer spends.

Analytics can help in the following ways:

Determine the likelihood that a given customer will repurchase a product after purchasing it in the past.
Personalize the site to customers who visit it repeatedly.
Monitor the amount of money individual customers or specific groups of customers spend.
Observe the geographic regions from which the most and the least customers visit the site and purchase specific products.
Predict which products customers are most and least likely to buy in the future.
The objective of web analytics is to serve as a business metric for promoting specific products to the customers who are most likely to buy them and to determine which products a specific customer is most likely to purchase. This can help improve the ratio of revenue to marketing costs.

In addition to these features, web analytics may track the clickthrough and drilldown behavior of customers within a website, determine the sites from which customers most often arrive, and communicate with browsers to track and analyze online behavior. The results of web analytics are provided in the form of tables, charts and graphs.