Web logs are data that are generated by its own users or visitors. Web logs are visitor’s data that are obtained from the web surfers which are very vital for website owners to monitor and evaluating the popularity or how the website is doing money wise. Simply put, web logs are a list of information that contains the statistics of a particular website.
Web logs can also be considered as a type of web hit counter that contains important information that a website owner would like to know about the performance of his site. Everyday data of the site is compiled and presented to the website owner in an organized manner. Several programs are developed to regularly generate the report. This is more commonly known as web analytics.
There are three common types of web analytics – client-side analytics, server-side analytics, and the hosted analytics. The client-side web analytics is advantageous if you intend to use it only for particular pages of your site. This type of analytics has automatic filters so they won’t be collecting images and other similar type of unnecessary hits data. And because of this, the size of your web log file is reduced. The only disadvantage of a client-side analytics is that there’s a tendency of collecting nothing at all if in case the clients have their cookies and java scripts turned off.
One type of analytics, the server-side analytics is quite advantageous to the end-user. And because most web servers generate web logs nowadays, server-side analytics can be immediately and easily available. The data generated usually include reports on bandwidth, spiders, load balancing, errors, and downloads. Another good point that server-side analytics has is that it won’t lose any of its web server log data, even if the server is down. This is because the one that collects the information is the server itself. But then again, client-side analytic reports are more accurate and provide more significant information than server-side analytics.
Hosted web analytics is the type of web log generating tool that does all the data acquisition and analysis from a different standpoint. It does not work on a particular page of the website (like a client-side analytics) or on a server (like the server-side analytics). Instead, it runs from an entirely different page and server. This is where the web analytic companies come in. These are private companies that track a certain website data from their own hosted servers. They help their clients with their web log file evaluation and development because they examine the website remotely. With web analytic services, website owners do not need to understand the technicalities behind web analytics because they would basically translate the statistics for you into something that you can understand and something that you would be of value to you.
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