Visitor tracking

There are two approaches to tracking site visitors – to use counters or to analyze web-server logs. The first one is easy to implement, provides basic statistics and is acceptable for most of the small sites. The major drawback of this approach is loss of information. The counter requests can be blocked by a browser or a corporate proxy-server. Besides, counters can't log crawlers.

Web-server logs analysis provides more complete and detailed information – errors statistics, traffic, images requests and file downloads; cookies contents, crawlers' activity, etc. Practice shows that the best results are achieved by using the combination of both methods. The counter provides general information in real time while web-server logs analysis tools deliver the detailed statistics.