Won't my web statistics program provided by my web hosting account do the same thing as web analytics?
There are two ways to obtain website traffic statistics and information. First, it’s possible to retrieve visitor data by reading the server visitor logs. The second method is to use a real-time visitor tracking system or a comprehensive web analytics program.
Every visitor's request is recorded by the server in its visit log. It looks something like this:
127.0.0.1 - computer [ 05/Sep/2007 : 11:55:32 -0900] " GET /apache_dr.gif HTTP/1.0" 200 2326 "http://www.thisisanexample.com/now.html" "Mozilla/3.08 [en] (WinXP; I ;Nav)"
For these reasons the best solution is a web analytics program. The most successful Internet sites employ web analytics. We help you compete effectively at the lowest possible cost with our comprehensive website analytics program.
There is some readily useful information in this server access log. Many log-analyzing programs are able to parse these server logs and display the information it contains in a user-friendly form that you can access if your web host provides the method. But if we take a closer look, this process does not truly present useful information for your marketing and understanding of how best to convert your website into revenue.
Log analyzers cannot give you detailed and distinctive information about the repeated and unique visits to your website, transaction cycle time, technical details of a visitor's browser, screen size and operating system, the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns and marketing, keywords they used to find you and which sites were the referrers, etc.
Web Analytics provides Real-time visitor tracking of your website traffic statistics. This allows you to analyze the data and provides you more information than simple server logs do because the data is gathered instantly at the time of the visit and immediately from the visitor's computer. That’s why this type of approach is called “real-time” visitor tracking.