Web Analytics – A Look At How Visitor Information Can Be Collected

Last week I wrote about why every web-site owner should be tracking their web-site visitors using web analytics.

This week I look at the manner in which site visitor traffic information can be collected.

There are two ways of collecting traffic data from a web site:

Log files
Page-tagging

Web servers generate reports about every site they host. These are known as log files and before page-tagging came along, this was the most popular way of collecting and analysing web-site usage information. The use of a program, generally known as a Log Analyzer, is required to work through the raw data produced by the server.

Page tagging involves a piece of code, usually Javascript, being inserted into a web page and a callback being made every time that page is requested. We advise most of our clients to use this method as it’s sufficiant for basic traffic analysis and easy to implement.

There are advantages and disadvantages in both methods and it comes down to the web site owner to make the decision which method suits their business better.

The advantages of using Log Files are:

Raw data is readily available as every server generates reports
Because the data is raw, any Log Analyzer program can be used for analysis
Can be more reliable as some web users ‘turn-off’ Javascript on their browsers and these visitors cannot be tracked by page-tagging

The advantages of using Page Tagging are:

No need to invest in any analysis programs (or the overhead in running them) as Google provides a free-to-use tool called Google Analytics, an easy-to-use, web-based graphical tool that provides fairly in-depth reports of site traffic
If you run Google AdWords campaigns, these can be linked to Analytics to provide in-depth reporting on your campaigns
Flash media can be tracked e.g. if your site hosts ads that are created in Flash
Whereas Log Files are more readily available to companies or site owners that own the web server their web site is hosted on, page-tagging is available to just about anyone.

I hope this information helps you in making a decision on which method suits you best. If you require any more information get in touch with us via our contact form…