If you are an owner of a website then you need to get website traffic trackers in order to know certain things that would be impossible to know without these tools.
Some of the questions that might cross your mind are how would you know that your website is meeting the needs of your site visitors? Or which are pages visitors visit the most? Or how do they get to your site and how long they stay there? These are some of the basic questions that can be answered once you start using website traffic trackers.
You can easily monitor increase website traffic logs through these software applications.
These traffic tracker software tools will allow you to evaluate and know about their behavioral patterns and it will also help you to focus more on your website's effectiveness.
In order to track all these patterns, you will have to get website traffic tracking software installed on your website.
But, here is the tricky part when you search on the Internet for traffic tracking tools, you will come across hundreds of software applications but you are not sure which one to choose or which one will be appropriate for your website.
So, here are certain factors that will help you to decide which one to choose: - What is included in a good traffic tracking software? - What is your exact requirement? - How much you are willing to spend? Get website traffic tracking software that has a two-way process, website logging and reporting.
Logging feature in the tracking software tools gather information about site visitors and the activities they have performed on that website.
Reporting on the hand other hand is a method which collects all the logged information and represents it in a format that is usable, so that site owners can assess, analyze and take necessary steps to improve their websites.
However, in the market there are only two types of tracking software available: - Host dependent - Self contained The host dependent traffic trackers create traffic reports on the basis of the data gathered from the server logs that are created by web hosting services.
Self contained traffic tracking software has the ability to create logs of its own and make traffic reports on the basis of the data captured in the created logs.
It might seem to you that both the types are equally good, but both of them have their share of advantages and disadvantages.
But, in order to monitor traffic logs on a webpage it is important to get website traffic tracking tools.
You can get website traffic monitoring done by host dependent software because most of the web hosting services provide various formats of logfiles, which is totally dependent on the platform/server that is being used.
The logs that are used here and that are quite popular are NCSA logs, W3 extended logs, Microsoft IIS logs, Webstar logs and Netscape logs.
Make sure that your web hosting service company offers these logs and if they don't, then its time to take services from a new hosting company.
Host dependent traffic monitoring software uses a script that is either in Perl or PHP and creates report on the basis of the information recorded in the server log files.
The main advantage of using a host dependent software is that you will not have to modify or develop your website in order to collect log data.
The main disadvantage of this software application is that it requires lots and lots of space to record server logs on your server and it becomes a huge problem if the site has lots of traffic.
This is simply because it records server logs in terms of hits than views.