Web analytics is nothing but the measuring web traffic. It is not limited to measuring web traffic. It includes:
- Analysis
- Data collection
- Reporting of web data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web pages
Google Analytics is the most widely used cloud-based web analytics service. However, your data is locked into Google Eco-system. If you want 100% data ownership, try the following open source web analytics software to get information about the number of visitors to your website and the number of page views. The information is useful for market research and understanding popularity trends on your website.
What the hell is a web log analysis software?
A web log analysis software (“web log analyzer”) is a kind of software that parses a Nginx/Apache/IIS/Lighttpd and any other web-server log file. It read various values contained in the log file, derives indicators about when, how, and by whom a web server is visited. You can find info about:
- Number of visits and number of unique visitors
- Visit duration and last visits
- Authenticated users and last authenticated visits
- Days of week and rush hours
- Countries of host’s visitors
- ISP
- Number of page views
- Most viewed, entry, and exit pages
- File types (HTML/TEXT/JPG/JS/CSS etc)
- OS used
- Mobile devices used
- Browsers used
- Robots used
- HTTP referrer
- Search engines and keywords used to find the analyzed
- HTTP errors
- Some of the log analyzers also report on who is on the site, conversion tracking, visit time and page navigation
Piwik – Web analytics application
Piwik is a free and open source web analytics application written in a PHP/MySQL.