Digital analytics is a set of tools that enables marketers and companies to understand how consumers are using their products and their presentations of products.
Consumers often seem unaware of how this analysis is being used. Analytics drives the Ad Choices feature used by Google, for example. The presentation of advertising is based on the known history of the consumer. A consumer with a history that includes hunting magazine sites and the NRA site is correspondingly less likely to receive advertisements for Victoria's Secret.
Every company wants to know which elements of its content are being selected by users -- and which aren't. This information is used to design pages to be most effective for most users. For the most part, this information is aggregated and anonymous. Unless the user is known to the company via some kind of authentication, most companies don't know and don't care about identifying individual users. They care about learning how users arrived at their site and what they did while there.