Hosted Web Analytics

What is a hosted web analytics software?

Once you have your website online, one thing you will want to know is who is visiting it. Even if you put a nice counter on your pages, time will come when you will want to know more!

Web servers record data into log files, so the first thing you could do is read those text files located on your web server.

Note that even web spider and crawler visits are logged into this file and after one or two days, depends of your website traffic, the file will contain more than 1000 lines! So reading this kind of log file is laborious and frustrating, this is why hosted web analytics tools have been created.

A raw log file usually looks like this:

You will therefore understand that an hosted web analytics tool is for measuring your website traffic first but can be also used for business research and market research.

How does a hosted web analytics tool work?

There are two main technological approaches to collecting the traffic data. The first method is log file analysis and the second one is called "page tagging" that uses a JavaScript code that you have to insert into each page of your site, usually at the top of the page just before the HTML closing tag </head>.

The first method, web server log file analysis

As explained above, your web server records data in log files. These log files can be read by a program like Awstats. This is a free log file analyzer tool that generates advanced web statistics graphically as you can see on the next picture:

The second method called "page tagging":

Hosted web analytics tools commonly use an invisible JavaScript code (page tag) embedded in site pages to track user activity of each website page.

Today Page tagging is considered to be the most effective and successful method to provide accurate and detailed data on your website visitors. Every time a page is visited, the JavaScript code will automatically be executed in the client web browser and will send information to a remote server. The captured data is then collected and processed to display website activity.

A very good and well known free hosted web analytics tool is Google Analytics. To be able to use it, you just need to create a new Google account (it's free).

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that provides in-depth reporting on your website usage and online marketing activities. The free version of Google Analytics can track as many website as you own and is limited to 5 million pageviews a month, however users with an active Google AdWords account are given unlimited pageview tracking.

Here is a video made by Google that is a brief overview of how to use the Google Analytics interface. This video is a good start if you are new to Google Analytics:

If you've just started to use Google Analytics, the next video provides a helpful firt-time analysis walkthrough. You'll learn how to interpret what you see in reports and what actions you should take as a result:

You can read more about all features of this free product on http://www.google.com/analytics/index.html

Real Time hosted web analytics tool

If you need real time statistics, there exists some nice products like Clicky. Clicky is a real time web analytics service. This means that when you login and view your stats, you are seeing up to the minute data on the traffic to your web site! Most services don't let you see what's happening "today" until the day after.

One thing I often use with Clicky is the Spy tool. This tool provide truly "live" data, while the rest of the service it typically 1-5 minutes behind real time. This means you'll see data in Spy before you see it show up anywhere else!

Clicky has both free and paid plans. At the moment I'm using the free one. All new accounts automatically get a free 21 day trial of the Pro service. You can upgrade any time during or after the trial. More info about this hosted web analytics tool: http://getclicky.com

Simplicity

If you are looking for a hosted web analytics program that display all information at a glance and on only one page, there exists Mint .

The interface of this self-hosted web analytics program is very simple. Visits, referrers, popular pages and searches can all be taken in at a glance on Mint's flexible dashboard.

Unfortunately this self-hosted analytics tool isn't free. A single site license is an affordable $30.