Web Data Types
Every online market should develop a passion for qualitative and quantitative analytics, this is how the sausage gets made! No matter what size your business is if you’re not basing your decisions on clean data you should buy a magic 8 ball and hope for the best.
Tell me more
While quantitative data describes what happens on your website, qualitative describes why it happens.
Quantitative Data – Looking at the actual numbers. These numbers are usually based off metrics like clicks, page loads and reported after the fact. The most accurate data on your users. This also included metrics like conversion funnels, traffic channels
Qualitative Data – subjective guessing on why people are doing certain things on your site. Why did they abandon their cart? You can gather this info by user interviews, focus groups, card sorting, eye-tracking, usability testing
Why would you use Qualitative data? Maybe there business cases unknown that might help your advertising campaigns in the future.
Tools like Google Analytics, Omniture, WebTrends, and Yahoo! Web Analytics generate quantitative, or clickstream, data. … Qualitative data comes from different sources, like user interviews and usability tests. But the easiest way to get qualitative data is through surveys.
Some useful tools (other then google analytics) to figure out the why what and how:
