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Web Analytics in China

A CWA Blog: From Basic to Advanced

Web2.0 (or cloud computing) opens a brave new world for website applications and products, and brings a lot of challenges for China’s web analytics as well. In this article, I want to briefly introduce how Chinese vendors help users to overcome challenge and meet their business requirement (although not perfectly meet).

  • Taobao sellers’ tracking puzzle

Taobao.com is an extremely popular C2C e-commerce platform in China, just like eBay in the States. Analysis International data says that more than 3 million sellers and 180 million buyers are bargining and dealing every day. One day, one of my friends who owns a Taobao shop asked me a question. He wanted to use Google Analytics to track his shop’s performance.

"Ohh… it seems not possible" is my first reaction.

But the requirement is there. Sellers want to know a lot of things about their shops, e.g. traffic volume, traffic quality, traffic source quality, promotion performance and conversion. They even wanna know what kind of page design and content is more powerful to attract prospects and persuade them to purchase. Some of them are even more "greedy", they want to know their competitors’ performance. But, disappointingly, Google Analytics seems not a solution for us common users. We can’t utilize Google Analytics directly because Taobao is a ASP (Application Service Provider) website, a web2.0 site, where JavaScript tracking codes not allowed. How could my friend do? Some smart Chinese practitioners gave out some solutions: continue reading…

Have you ever been asked the influence of Javascript disabled or cookie disabled for web analytics by your client? This is really a problem haunting me for long time, and sometimes clients will regard it as a scary issue. They would like to challenge that web analytics is not "accurate" (see the Chinese article for detail on "accurate" of web analytics: 网站分析——我们的数据准确吗?) from this perspective. Therefore I think it’s really my task to figure out how much influence it will bring substantially.

  • JavaScript disabled

Adding JavaScript tracking codes to track page performance is the most popular way of web analytics today. As below graph illustrated, tracking codes is like the tiny red block embedded in page’s HTML source file. When page downloads, these JavaScript codes will be executed in the meantime, just like the Zerg’s parasite in StarCraft, or monitoring camera in bank, and the data recorded. If a browser disabled JavaScript, tracking process can’t be triggered and the user’s behavior data won’t be transfered to web analytics tracking tools. It’s pathetic, right? So, JavaScript function to be opt-on is vital for web analytics.

JavaScript-for-WA

JavaScript tracking codes is the "spy" in a page to track page performance continue reading…

Hi! My dear friends, how are you?

I wish all the best for you in the Tiger year. Be a tiger, but not Tiger Woods! ;)

This blog is the English version of 网站分析在中国 (web analytics in China). Hope you could support her and me as always!

Will put some of the good articles in several weeks. Please STAY TUNED!

Yours Sincerely,

Sidney Song