What is web analytics?
Web analytics is the measurement and analysis of website traffic and behaviour. What it covers, how the data is collected, the core metrics, and where it stops.
What is web analytics?
Web analytics is the collection, measurement and analysis of what happens on a website: who visits, where they came from, which pages they see, and what they do before they leave. Its purpose is to inform decisions about the site, not simply to report traffic. It covers the website itself rather than every digital channel.
How the data gets collected
There are three collection methods in general use, and most real setups combine them.
- Client-side JavaScript. A script on the page reports pageviews and events. It sees everything the browser sees, including engagement time, scroll depth and viewport, and it can be blocked.
- Server-side. Your backend sends events directly. Nothing can block it, and it cannot observe anything that happens in the browser.
- Server logs. Every request your server handled, including bots and assets. Complete but coarse, with no view of client-side behaviour at all.
Client-side is the default because it answers the widest range of questions. Its weaknesses, blocking and lost requests, are what a first-party proxy and server-side events for critical conversions are for.
The metrics every tool reports
Whatever the vendor, the core set is the same, and it is worth knowing which layer each metric belongs to.
- Volume: pageviews, sessions, unique visitors. Three counts of the same traffic at three levels of grouping.
- Acquisition: referrers, search, campaigns, direct. Where the traffic came from.
- Behaviour: entry and exit pages, engagement time, scroll depth, bounce and exit rates.
- Outcomes: goals, conversion rate, revenue. The layer that connects the rest to money.
The outcomes layer is the one teams most often skip, and the one that makes everything above it worth reading. Traffic without conversions is a number nobody can act on.
What web analytics cannot tell you
Being clear about the boundary saves a lot of wasted effort.
It cannot tell you why. It records that 60% of people abandoned a form, never what they were confused by. Session replay narrows the gap; user interviews close it.
It cannot see what it was never sent. Dark traffic, cross-device journeys, word of mouth and anything a blocker removed are all absent, and absent data does not announce itself.
It cannot count people, only browsers. One person on a phone and a laptop is two visitors in every tool ever built, unless they log in.
And in a cookieless setup it cannot follow anyone across days, which is a deliberate design property rather than a defect. Long-window questions need either an optional cookie mode with consent or your own user id.
See it on real data
The live demo is a fully populated dashboard with real demo traffic. No signup and no card required.
Open the live demoWhat separates a useful setup from a dashboard nobody opens
A small number of defined metrics
Three metrics everyone agrees on beat forty nobody has read. Write down the definitions, including the denominators.
Conversions instrumented from day one
Traffic reporting without goals cannot answer any question worth asking. Instrument the outcomes before you tune the charts.
Bot filtering that happens at ingest
Measured over 30 days on a live site running Mrkr, bot hits were 4.1 times the human pageviews. Unfiltered, that is not analytics, it is infrastructure noise.
Data you can take with you
If the history only exists inside one vendor's UI, switching tools means starting from zero. Full export is what makes it yours.
Where Mrkr sits
Mrkr is web analytics that runs cookieless by default: it stores nothing persistent on the visitor's device, so it does not require a consent banner for its own measurement, and it therefore counts all of your traffic rather than the consenting fraction.
It covers the full set above, including goals and revenue, plus session replay, funnels and cohorts. Bots and referrer spam are classified and dropped at ingest rather than filtered in the dashboard, so historical aggregates are clean too.
Where you need cross-day identity, an optional per-site cookie mode provides it and requires consent on that site. The default is the other way around because most teams want the banner gone more than they want the longer window.
Questions, answered.
Related terms.
- What is digital analytics?
Digital analytics is the measurement and analysis of customer behaviour across every digital channel a business operates: website, mobile app, email, advertising platforms, support and in-product usage.
- What is product analytics?
Product analytics is the measurement of what people do inside a product rather than how they arrived at it.
- What is pageview?
A pageview is a single recorded view of a page on your site.
- What is session?
A session is one continuous visit to a site: a group of pageviews and events from the same visitor with no long gap between them.
- What is cookieless analytics?
Cookieless analytics measures website traffic without storing a cookie, a localStorage value or any other identifier on the visitor's device.
Where this shows up in Mrkr
- Open a full web analytics dashboard in the live demo
Real demo traffic, no signup and no card.
- How Mrkr does web analytics without cookies
- Browse the full analytics glossary
Every metric, method and privacy term, defined in one place.
Your first visitor is already here.
Drop in the script and watch them land. It takes about a minute.