The process of constantly testing, analyzing and optimizing is not a new phenomenon in management and marketing. The ability to monitor the success of a campaign or process is important for growth and optimization of the campaign and future campaigns. Monitoring offline marketer campaigns has been a very tedious task and more subjective (with huge dependence on human intervention) the online equivalent has grown from the early days of the www evolution to a mammoth technological driven process that is and industry on its own. Today's analytics solutions range from social media monitoring tools, web analytics platforms, sentiment analysis platforms and many others.

Initially with the one-page websites, it was just enough to know the number of hits or visitors a website was getting, however as the websites became more dynamic and complex, better analytical tools were developed. Sophisticated page tag analysis became popular when Google acquired Urchin in March 2005; Google analytics was launched as a new service.

The crux of analytics and conversion optimization is not about collection of data but the, the collection of actionable data (data that can be acted on). The whole process should include identification of goals of optimization, collection of data, analysis of the data and the analyzed data will inform the action to the taken.

There are pointers and indicators that help inform on the performance and achievement of goals, these are called key performance indices (KPI's). The KPI's can be optimized to ensure the ultimate goal of the marketing campaign is being achieved, this can be done by setting conversion optimization goals(a subset of digital and marketing goals).

Today's web analytics technologies and platforms involve two major approaches for collect web analytics data: log file analysis and page tagging.

Website analytics software or platforms help optimize the various marketing campaigns. SEO, email marketing, pay per click advertising, display advertising campaigns can prove pointless if the visitors to the site are not performing the desired actions. The percentage conversion achieved can always be measured against the desired percentage conversion and the campaign subsequently optimized to help businesses and organizations reach their online marketing goals.

The various metrics that can be monitored for analysis are:

Visit duration- the length of time a visitor spends in a session

Referrer- the URL that originally directed the visitor (user) to the current page

Internal referrer - a referring URL that is part of the same web site

External referrer- a referring URL that is outside of the web site

Search referrer- the referring URL that is generated by a search function

Original referrer- the URL that sent a new visitor to the web site

Click-through- the number of times a link was clicked by a visitor.

Click-through rate- the number of times a link was clicked divided by the

Number of times it was seen (impressions), this can significantly help monitor the performance.

Page views per visit- the number of page views in a reporting period divided by the number of visits in that same period.

Page exit ratio - number of exits from a page divided by total number of page Views of that page. This helps monitor the relevance of the webpage to the visitors of the site.

Single page visits- visits that consist of one page, even if that page was viewed a number of times

Bounces (single page view visits) - visits consisting of a single page view

Bounce rate- single page view visits divided by entry pages