When exploring a brand, company, product, or service, our instincts lead us to search for more information on their website. A website serves as a window into a company’s offerings, influencing user engagement through aesthetics, content, and usability.
As we browse through the webpages benignly, businesses remain diligently active behind the scenes, meticulously tracking our every move. This data becomes a treasure trove for them, as they harness it to unlock the true potential of their websites. Welcome to Web Analytics!
Web analytics is a formidable tool, empowering businesses to curate unparalleled user experiences, optimise web utilisation, obtain invaluable market insights, and work wonders with their online presence.
Web analytics and its capabilities
Web analytics involves gathering, structuring, analysing, and presenting web data to improve website performance and conduct market research.
It offers several benefits, including personalised website experiences for frequent visitors, monitoring spending trends, analysing purchase activity by demographics, boosting search engine optimization (SEO), and predicting product purchase trends.
Web analytics is a powerful engine with limitless possibilities and boundless rewards.
Web3: The Evolution
Web1, the initial version, offered static web pages. Users could only read their content. Interactivity, either with the web pages or with other users logged into the same network, was nil.
Web2, the current version, facilitates user-generated content. Increased user interactivity and collaboration, extensive network connectivity, and improved communication channels (think Twitter, Facebook and other such platforms) are a few of its distinguished features.
Web3, an evolving web iteration, seeks to democratise the internet. It is about transferring the power of data control from corporations and governments to people. It has the following principles at its core:
- Decentralisation: Departure from the current highly centralised Web which confines users to the walled gardens of tech giants like Google and Meta.
- User-centricity: Users have more control and ownership over their data, identities, and online activities. This gives them the freedom to handle and secure their personal information.
- Transparency: This aims to create a more open and accountable web ecosystem. Blockchain, one of the Web3 technologies, enables this with public ledgers, a record-keeping system that maintains records such as identities of participants, balances of their cryptocurrency accounts and records of transactions, if any, between all the participants on the chain. Though transparent, blockchain is secure. The information in it is immutable — it cannot be changed, manipulated or hacked into.
- Trustlessness: With this, Web3 shifts power dynamics away from centralised entities (Twitter, Facebook, and so on) and towards users allowing them to transact, collaborate, and engage in peer-to-peer transactions without relying on intermediaries or placing blind trust in third parties (Internet Service Providers).
Web3 is a revolutionary idea. It touches everything web-related, analytics included. Here are some of the key ways in which web analytics will be impacted:
- Accommodation of decentralised data sources: In the Web3 ecosystem, individuals have greater control over their data. This shift in data ownership means web analytics will need to evolve to accommodate decentralised data sources. Traditional analytics practices heavily rely on centralised data. However, on Web3, users can control and manage their own data. Analytics solutions will need to adapt to work with user-controlled data and integrate with decentralised data sources.
- More privacy-friendly: Web3 emphasises user privacy and consent. Analytics practices will need to align with these stricter privacy standards. This means obtaining explicit user consent for data collection and ensuring transparent data usage. Web analytics tools will need to provide clear information to users about the types of data being collected, and how it will be used. In addition, they will need to give users the ability to manage their privacy preferences effectively.
- Transparent data collection: Transparency is a fundamental principle of Web3. This extends to data collection and usage. Web analytics will need to provide enhanced visibility into data gathering and usage. Users should have access to information about data being collected, how it is being used, and who has access to it. This transparency fosters confidence between analytics providers and consumers, assuring them that their data is being used legally and ethically.
- New analytical metrics: With the rise of tokenization in Web3, new metrics (tokenized) and indicators may emerge in web analytics. Token-based metrics could provide insights into user behaviours and interactions within decentralised applications (dApps). For example, analytics could track token value or measure engagement levels within specific dApps. Incorporating tokenized metrics into web analytics will require new measurement frameworks and tools to capture and analyse these unique data points.
- Decentralised analytics solutions: As Web3 promotes decentralisation, analytics solutions themselves may evolve to become more distributed. This could involve the development of decentralised analytics platforms that operate on distributed networks or leverage blockchain technology. Decentralised analytics solutions can enhance data integrity, transparency, and privacy. They can also enable analytics without relying on centralised servers or trusted intermediaries, aligning with Web3 principles.
As Web3 continues to shape-shift and evolve, web analytics will have to dance to the new tunes it sings!
Web analytics will need to accommodate decentralised data sources, adhere to stronger privacy standards, provide transparent data collection, incorporate token-based metrics, and potentially explore distributed analytics solutions.
Web analytics will need to re-evaluate their practices and adapt to the transformations brought on by this radically decentralised web paradigm.
