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The first task of the small team was to build the tracking system Gemius which later gave the name of the company. From 1999 to 2002, for the first three years of its operation, Gemius became the undisputed leader among web analytics companies in Poland. It was the only company in the country offering research focused on websites which set industry standards.

The interest of customers proved that, at this time, the companies in the industry had realized the potential of the Internet and were looking for more tools to help them optimize the use of the Internet in their work. In response to this demand, the management of Gemius had decided to expand the activities in two directions, namely product and geography, with an emphasis on the readiness to respond to customer needs. Within just one year (2002-2003), Gemius added to its portfolio five new products for research. It started offering comprehensive and holistic measurement of the effectiveness of online advertising campaigns, analyses of the profiles of Internet audiences and individual research projects on behalf of individual customers.

A significant point in the development of the company and the entire Polish Internet was the first publication of the results of the study, measuring the audiences, Megapanel PBI / Gemius (now known as gemiusAudience on the Polish market too) in January 2005. This project had started years earlier, on the initiative of company PBI and the development of the methodology was completed in October 2004. So, Gemius began to measure the audiences of websites and Internet applications in Poland. This analysis had quickly become the standard for online media planning in the industry.

Benefits from gemiusAudience for owners of websites

Advertising revenues are a significant source of funds for most websites. The results of the gemiusAudience study are the foundation of advertisers’ budget planning. The survey provides information on

- the socio-demographic profile of users visiting a particular website
- the target groups among which a particular website is popular
- the effect of comparing the website of interest with competitive websites
- the doubling of the audience of several websites that have the same owner.

Furthermore, the results of gemiusAudience allow a direct assessment of the impact of promotional or popularizing activities of an online service. The effectiveness of the activities can be measured, for example, when the traffic increases (the average time per visitor to a website) or when the number of realized impressions increases. Therefore, the analysis of the results of gemiusAudience allows optimization of the marketing activities of certain Internet services.

Facebook Page Insights

I have mentioned several times the social networks and their importance regarding the change in consumer habits and their impact on various metrics. Very often, a small family owned business may not have its own website but it has its own Facebook page. The social network is constantly updating the tools through which you can track what happens to the fans of your business page.

The latest version of Page Insights, the statistics tool, has been expanded and now it includes very useful information. The use of a specific user profile is one way to find out the type of your audience. Facebook can boast that it has the most complete information regarding user profiles. Here is the composition of visitors to the Bulgarian version of GRReporter:

Explore in detail the visitors to your Facebook page. The majority of them are regular visitors to your website too. Although the data from Facebook Page Insight are not related to your website, you can get a good idea of ​​the composition of the people who are interested in your materials, not only on Facebook, but in general.

Alexa Internet

Alexa Internet, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, is based in California and it provides paid services related to web traffic. Established as an independent company in 1996, Alexa was acquired by Amazon in 1999. Alexa uses browser plug-ins to collect data on consumer behaviour, which it then transmits for analyses. In 2013, Alexa provides traffic data, global rankings and other information on 30 million websites.

You do not have to register or put a special code on your website to view the basic information provided by Alexa. You can simply enter the website address and Alexa will show the relevant information. This is very convenient for a quick reference.

I decided to perform a quick check on the validity of the data and typed www.grreporter.info:

Alexa supports the history option just for the first 100,000 sites in its rankings. To my great surprise, it ranked only the Greek version of our website although its English and Bulgarian versions are more popular.

There was a significant discrepancy in the results obtained from Google Analytics and Alexa. For example, the difference in the time that users spend on our website was double and the trends radically different.

Be careful when using free statistics from Alexa. Toolbars are no longer as popular as they were a few years ago and the statistics you obtain may be partial and incomplete.

The paid service of Alexa relies on a code that you have to put on your website and these data would be much more accurate.