Introducing website analytics

Website analytics is the act of collecting, aggregating, analyzing, and reporting a website's data. Let's break website analytics down into two categories:

• Page analytics: Analytics we gather about how users interact with our website. This could be page views, click rates, or bounce rates, for example.
• Performance Monitoring: Analytics we gather on how our code performs for our users. This is primarily used for logging errors in our JavaScript that our users encounter.

Regardless of the category, they all work in a similar way. First, an inserted script tag loads a small amount of JavaScript into the page. This code is run in the web browser of anyone visiting the site. In most cases, the code drops a small text file with small pieces of data known as cookies onto the users' browsers. This data is used to identify the user session. This is sent back to the analytics tool, along with request information, to identify the...