Explain How Cookies Is Key To Building A Good Analytical Page Design

Essential to the accuracy of website metrics, is a solid understanding of how cookies and URLs contribute to the overall analytic design. According to Kaushik, data collected from URLs and cookies “have more effect on everything we do in web analytics that any other piece of data” (Kaushik, 2007, p.126). That’s a pretty profound statement, which should implore website analysts to take a closer look at cookies and URLs. A cursory knowledge of cookies and URLs can help an analyst capture data metrics, but are those metrics an accurate assessment of the website’s activity? The following paper will examine cookies and URLs and how understanding them is key to building a good analytic page design. Cookies have been a part of web applications for a long time and are a great way of tracking users. Most technically savvy computer users recognize cookies as small text files placed on their computer when browsing the web. While cookies are often used to manage sessions, they can also help a web analyst identify and track unique visitors on their website. Cookies can do more than track visitors, since they can store all kinds of information. However, in order to capture metrics accurately from cookies, an analyst needs to understand the behavior of first and third party cookies, as well as the benefit of documenting what is being stored in them

Again, most knowledgeable computer users understand the acronym ‘URL’ to represent the short version of ‘Uniform Resource Locator’. At a glance, a URL is a string of characters located in the address bar of a typical web browser. Whether typed in directly or via a hypertext link, the browser redirects the user to a specific page in a website based on the distinct URL address provided. Nevertheless, this innocuous URL string contains a great deal of useful information for a web analyst. A closer look at the anatomy of a URL is helpful when describing