So you opened the door to your home on the Internet and now you want to know who's visiting it, who's downloading files, and who's clicking on your advertisements located across the web?
For these purposes, many resort to web server log analyzers. These tools depend on raw server logs to gather information and generate usage statistics. Because your web server automatically records every hit, image, and applet in the background, log analyzers simply import this massive data stream to generate reports. Here is why that approach falls short:
You must have direct access to your web server logs to run an analyzer. If you are using shared or free web hosting, you may not even have access to these files.
In most cases, web server logs must be downloaded to your local computer. Server log files are massive, consuming significant time during download and wasting local disk space.
Because log analyzers have to filter through gigabytes of unindexed text records to generate specific reports, processing can be an extremely time-consuming task.
Web server log analyzers are heavily platform-dependent. While most analyzers read common log formats, very few are capable of running seamlessly across different operating systems.
Due to browser and proxy caching, up to 40% of unique visitor traffic is never logged by web server log files. Server logs were created by system administrators to manage network bandwidth—not by business professionals who need to measure true human interaction.
On most web hosts, raw server logs are archived for a few weeks or months at most. Unless you manually download logs every single day, crucial historical data gets lost forever.
Server logs cannot log activity across mirror sites, off-site content (such as your external banner ads), or accurately track how visitors discovered your website.
Web server logs are notoriously inconsistent. Many are missing HTTP Referer or User-Agent headers, or force you to collate separate log files manually. Worse, when moving your website to a new host, log formats often change completely, breaking your historical reporting.