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    Web analytics is the process of quantifying the behavior of a website’s visitors. Web analytics have become a very important part of e-commerce since they can show the website owner which landing pages are effective in convincing people to subscribe to services or purchase the company’s products. Web analytics can also be used to monitor and analyze how well a website is achieving its goals.

    Tracking Web Site Visitors through Logfile Analysis

    Logfile analysis is an important aspect of web analytics. By using the logfile records of web servers, the popularity of a certain website can be determined. Logfile analysis of the web server can produce important marketing data such as the number of unique visitors to a site by monitoring the number of times requests to the web server are made by unique users. This proved to be a powerful tool especially when websites were only composed of a single HTML file. With the influx of multiple-paged websites, however, this tool became less useful and thus had to be upgraded with page view counts and visit counts in order to make it more effective in providing website view statistics and popularity information.

    The growing popularity of search engines, however, has once again undermined the efficiency of website analytics by logfile analysis. This was mainly because logfile analysis had to distinguish between requests from individual human visitors and requests from search engine spiders and bots. The difficulty was compounded by the emergence of new Internet modifications like dynamically assigned IP addresses, web caches and web proxies. Logfile analysis managed to adapt to these new innovations somewhat by integrating analyzers to exclude cookies and spider requests.

    The advantage of using this method in web analytics is that log files are more readily available than page tags; websites would need some modifications prior to collection of information via page tagging. Log files are also more accurate than page tags as they don’t require the cooperation of a visitor’s browser. Moreover, locking of page tag programs by its vendors means that website owners could not easily switch to another method in order to view the required information whereas logfiles are readily compatible with all web analytics programs.

    Some examples of web analytics tools which use log file analysis include:

    Tracking Web Site Visitors with Javascript

    Page tagging arose as a web analytics tool primarily because of the need to solve the problem created by web caches. This method uses Java Script to inform a third-party server of a unique page request from human visitors. Web analytics companies assign the visitor a cookie to distinguish him from other visitors and to recognize him if he visits again in the future.

    The advantage of using page tagging as a web analytics tool lies in the fact that it solves the web caching problem, collects more information and events than logfile analysis and is available even for companies that do not own their own web servers.

    These two methods of web analytics, however, can both be provided by web analytics companies so that website owners can get the best data possible.

    Here are some examples of web site tracking tools which rely on Javascript:

     

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    7 comments
    1. Daniel Brown

      30 March, 2016 at 9:43 am

      Very informative for WordPress users. One more thing I want to share is this WordPress Theme builder Template Toaster . Create Themes/Templates/Websites easily.

      Reply
    2. Dev bordia

      26 April, 2015 at 7:14 am

      update links asshole

      Reply
    3. krishna

      7 October, 2011 at 3:52 am

      Is there any tool which can analyses the visitor who left in a particular page??
      For example:
      Ram has visited some abc website and it contains Home, Index, Options and result pages. So, he just visited home page and left and some other person visited up to options page and left. In this way how may visitors totally visited the site and how many visitors viewed particular page.
      Thanks in advance
      Murali
       
       

      Reply
    4. Than Nguyen

      6 September, 2011 at 11:11 pm

      Can anyone recommend a web analytics software that can track the IP address of the visitor. Google Analytics does not offer this feature. I work for a small business so Omniture would be overkill and too expensive. 

      Reply
    5. Tina2

      20 June, 2011 at 10:23 am

      Hello
      Analytics is the best for view our visitors.
      But if you need to view how many visitors has any other site you can use statspy.org free tool. It is very useful, i use it recently.

      Reply
    6. oksida.com

      16 March, 2011 at 5:00 am

      Google Analytics is best for me

      Reply
    7. JasRaj

      14 March, 2011 at 8:48 am

      Hi,
      i want to track data from other URL like Visiters info etc. 

      Reply
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