Although the field of web analytics is still in its infancy as it continues to change and adapt to new and emerging technologies it has made tremendous strides in the past fifteen years. Gone are the days where a simple counter at the bottom of almost every Geocities website was enough to get an indication of visitor interaction. This was a very primitive method of checking hits, and early counters simply allowed visitors to hit refresh to see the counter increase. Later counters fixed this problem and added information such as “X amount of hits since Y date” to give additional insight as to how long this data has been collecting.
In the mid 1990s some smart fellow looked at gleaming information from web server logs and log file analysis was started. Web server log files allowed for the introduction of metrics beyond hits, and included items such as page views and sessions. While not terribly important it allowed for greater insight as to visitor behavior than just hits which counters were collecting. In the late 1990s search engine spiders and other robots added to the complexity of tracking visitor behavior, and it made it hard to discern the difference between human and non human visitors. One such application that utilizes web server logs is Urchin 5 which is pictured below. Still heavily used throughout many companies it has a new version Urchin 6 in beta, and is one of the few surviving applications that still rely upon web server logs.
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