Web Analytics

Web Analytics is a method to track the behavior of visitors to a website. The information comes in different categories: Hits, Page Views, Visits, and Visitors.

Hits are how many times a file on your website has been accessed.

Visits show how many individual visitors have come to your site; one visit can create multiple hits (i.e. every time a visitor goes to a different page on your site).

Visitors are the unique users to your site, a visitor can have multiple visits (a.k.a Returning Visitors).

Page Views tell you what pages have been viewed the most, their popularity, etc. A Page View can also create multiple hits because it must call the server for every image and file that it must load in order to build the page.

For more information on Web Analytics visit Wikipedia.org

There are a variety of tools/programs out on the market today to help you track your website’s analytics. Most hosting companies will be able to offer you a tool of their own, if not here is a brief about a few options:

Google Analytics
What’s great about this service is that one, it’s free and two there is nothing to download or install! All you (or your Web Designer/Developer) have to do is put in a simple tracking code on all of your pages and you’re done. The downside is that you need an invitation from someone who already uses it. You can sign up for an invitation but it can take several weeks before getting one.

WebTrends
One of the many leading Web Analytics tools that gives you tons of flexibility based on the size of your business. You can customize the tools for every employee based on what information they’ll need for their reports and you can get it as a software program or as an On-Demand service.

WebSideStory
Available as an On-Demand service, this tool allows you to track everything from your basic website navigation to your campaigns. Many major companies such as Best Buy, Cisco Systems and the Walt Disney Internet Group use them.

AWStats
AWStats is a free powerful and featureful tool that generates advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics, graphically. This log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and shows you all possible information your log contains, in few graphical web pages. It uses a partial information file to be able to process large log files, often and quickly. It can analyze log files from all major server tools like Apache log files (NCSA combined/XLF/ELF log format or common/CLF log format), WebStar, IIS (W3C log format) and a lot of other web, proxy, wap, streaming servers, mail servers and some ftp servers.

Analog
Analog is a program to measure the usage on your web server. It tells you which pages are most popular, which countries people are visiting from, which sites they tried to follow broken links from, and all sorts of other useful information.

Insight logger
Insight aims to be an easy to use, GUI-based Web server log file analysis tool, providing professional-looking graphical reports that distinguish "robot" traffic from real visitors.

AWFFull
AWFFull is a Web server log analysis program, forked from Webalizer. It adds a number of new features and improvements, such as extended frontpage history, resizable graphs, and a few more pie charts.

Webalizer
The Webalizer is a Web server log analysis program. It is designed to scan web server log files in various formats and produce usage statistics in HTML format for viewing through a browser. It supports wu-ftpd xferlog-formatted logs.

MagicStats
MagicStats is a Web server log analysis tool that aims to be powerful and flexible, while still maintaining high performance. It is customizable on three levels (plugins, themes, and config files).

Relax Referrer Analyser
Relax is a free specialized web server log analysis tool for referrer information processing. It answers the question: "Which search engines, search keywords and referring URLs led visitors to your site?". It can also track down bad links and analyze which keywords to bid for at pay-per-click search engines. The parser module in Relax recognizes several hundred search engines and is capable of extracting the keywords used. Generated HTML reports can be configured to include links to other Web-based keyword analysis tools, making it easier to further improve the ranking of web pages in search engines.

phpMyVisites
phpMyVisites is a Web traffic analyzer with very detailed reports and advanced graphics. It is not an Apache log analysis tool. phpMyVisites creates its own logs, and it allows access to more complete statistics. phpMyVisites provides information about visitors, page views, visitor follow-ups, countries of origin, software configurations, referrers, and much more. It also includes a powerful administration and configuration tool.

Proxy Servers

A proxy server is a computer that offers a computer network service to allow clients to make indirect network connections to other network services. A client connects to the proxy server, then requests a connection, file, or other resource available on a different server.

The proxy provides the resource either by connecting to the specified server or by serving it from a cache. In some cases, the proxy may alter the client's request or the server's response for various purposes.

An example of a Proxy Server is Google Web Accelerator. Google Web Accelerator is a web accelerator produced by Google. It uses data compression and prefetching of content which may be cached on Google's servers to speed up page load times. The beta, released on May 4, 2005 works with both Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows machines.

Negative Effects on Statistics
Proxy servers speed delivery of web pages to users but have a negative effect on web server log files because the request for content never actually comes through to the web server. The requested information is kept on the poxy server as opposed to the content’s original site. Proxy servers will significantly affect the value of data based on host counting, including visit tracking metrics.

When a proxy exists between a group of users and your website, you see all requests from those users as if they came from the one host (the proxy server). Even if three different people at a company are browsing your site, it looks like they are all one host to your web server. As visit tracking depends in part on the host making the request, this can make the visit statistics much different from actual visits.

On top of all of this, some service providers (AOL being the most prevalent) have implemented a new technique called ‘proxy clustering.’ Proxy clustering works by routing subsequent request from a user to different proxy servers. If a given user pulls up your home page, the browser will request the page and then all the graphics on that page. Each graphics requests will be passed through a different proxy so that they can all be processed simultaneously. This means that each request looks like it came from a different host (the proxy server). Trying to detect which requests are part of each visitor’s session is very hard when the hosts are not the same, as this is the basis for visit detection.

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