Web Analytics Traffic Data Sources

After you decide that you need to analyse your web site visitor traffic, next and very important step is to determine which data you are going to analyse. And that must be done before picking the web analytics vendor.

Visitor Data Collection Methods

In 99% cases of collecting data used forms are Page Tagging and Log Files.

Page tags are files collected by visitor’s web browser, achieved by placing “beacon code” on each page of a website. It is often no more than a snippet of code referencing javascript file. Some vendors add multiple custom tags to set or collect data and this technique is known as client-side data collection.

And Log files represent data collected by your web server and doesn’t depend on visitors browser. As it is set by default, all requests to server are stored into the log file (images, pdfs, pages, etc.) And those log files are usually just plain text files. This technique is called server-side data collection.

Looking in direction of past web analytics, log files were used to analyse web site visitor behavior. However, page files became very popular in recent years and definitively are easy to use for average user.

It is important to say at this point that both techniques have their limitations. In table below you can see both limitations and advantages of both data collecting techniques.
For purpose of removing those limitations and gaining something of advantages most of today’s solutions use both methods and that approach in web analytics data collection is called Hybrid method.

Probably main reason of page tag popularity is that they allow to be outsourced as hosted solutions. That way data is collected, organized and analysed away of your organization reducing costs and saving your IT or yourself of configuring and maintaining chosen web analytics solution. Most spread web analytics tool in small size businesses and web sites is Google Analytics and many people after a while notice that they are not reaching anything with it and they decide to get web consultant check their web sites, improve tracking, etc… One of best in help those user is Spes Media – Web Marketing Consulting Company.

In list below you can see limitations and advantages of two data collection techniques.

Written by Spes Media Ltd. – www.spesmedia.com