Internet marketing, visitor counter or log analyzer?

What is Internet Marketing?

The development of Internet technologies has brought us to the advent of a new field in the marketing, Internet Marketing.

Internet marketing is the research of the target audience, studying the market situation and predicting changes for the online market, plus the package of actions aimed at bringing potential customers to the website by improving the website's visibility in search engines and placing all sorts of ads throughout the Net. An integral part of the Internet marketing is the website's visits statistics.

Any of your actions toward increasing sales are to be evaluated in terms of their efficiency. The quality analysis of the Internet statistics will help you understand your prospective customers' demands and interests, evaluate the attraction and retention methods that are good for the customers and reveal what makes them to not get interested in your products or services.

However, how can you identify a visitor that comes to your website?

The solution is to set up your own visitor counter.
It does not have critical drawbacks - it is the most precise tool, and this is the only method used by experts for the analysis of a website statistics in combination with log analyzers.

To this moment, only the cookie-based analysis combined with other methods
(in case cookies are disabled in the browser) draws the picture that is close enough to the reality.

There are only three major methods for gathering the visitor statistics for a website: local visitor counter, visitor counter on a remote server,
and log analyzer.

What is visitor counter?

Visitor counter is an interactive graphical element embedded in the web page design, which is managed by a script from a local or remote server.
Advantage Web Log Analyzer runs in the "Local Visitor Counter" mode.

What is log analyzer?

When a visitor comes to your website, the server registers all of that visitor's requests to the server in a special log file. The programs that analyze the content of that file are called log analyzers. Advantage Web Log Analyzer also runs in the "Log Analyzer" mode.

What's the best choice?

Let's take a look at the Server Log Analysis option.

The server logs analysis is known to be the most accurate statistics tool.
It is a precise enough for the majority of cases. It is the most complete but not the most precise tool though.

It is the most complete option since the web server registers ALL requests user sends to your website in a log file. When no requests occur, no records are added to the log file. However, some hosting service providers have a "gift" for us, even here. Since even the simplest write operation puts a load on the server, they often "cheat" by cropping the valuable data.

On the other hand, the statistics gathered with this approach is not accurate. For instance, in 99% of time, a web server does not register cookies. That makes it impossible to identify a visitor, and thus generating the accurate reports with this approach seems to be problematic.
This approach to gathering the statistics does not provide enough data for the most important reports on efficiency of sales and marketing campaigns. These reports cannot be generated at all, since it the server log analysis approach makes it impossible to identify a user that came to a website on one day and then purchased a marketed item a week later.

Let's take a look at the Remote Visitor Counter option.

Visitor Counter vs. Log File Analyzer - Advantages:

• Can identify a user through Cookies.
• Can identify a new/returning user.
• Can identify user's screen settings.
• Can identify whether user's browser allows using Java, JavaScript or Cookies.
• Can identify the version of JavaScript used in user's browser.
• Can identify whether user connects through a proxy server.
• Can identify whether user's browser supports frames.
• Can identify user's time zone.
• Can identify user's browser language.
• Can draw a graphical counter on your website pages.

Visitor Counter vs. Log File Analyzer - Drawbacks:

• Not a single counter can provide information on: downloading files, opening multimedia files, flash objects, images, etc.
• Does not recognize search bots.
• Does not calculate data transfer.
• Does not analyze page access codes.
• Does not identify page access methods.
• Does not identify hacker attacks on your server.

Critical drawbacks:

• Any remote counter hosted on an external server will "lose" visitors.
  Even if the service provider runs extremely powerful servers and uses a wide data link, the statistics will still be inaccurate. A visitor who opened your web page with the counter for 99.9% will be able to open your local counter image; however, the external counter can remain unopened due to the overload of the data link to the external counter service provider.
  
  
• 1-Party Cookies, P3P.
  Your browser is really concerned about your security, so even if you have cookies enabled, it will often reject cookies from websites other than the website being viewed. This protects you from collecting the user's personal data. On the other hand, that gives the inaccurate data to the statistics engine.
  
  
• You are not the only person who may see your statistics - it is also available to the counter service provider and, therefore, to your competitors. Basically, that's all what's necessary to put your website out of the game. That data may help your competitors not only find out where from and how many customers you have but even find out how to optimize their website in order to leave yours far behind them. All your new ideas and search for marketing channels may end up with the zero result if your statistics data is available to your competitors.
  
  This is one of the reasons why serious businesses do not place third-party counters on their companies' websites.
  

Let's take a look at the Local Visitor Counter option.

No critical drawbacks - it is the most precise tool, and this is the only method used by the experts for the analysis of a website statistics in combination with log analyzers.

Advantage Web Log Analyzer runs in these two modes.

• Fully functional 14-day trial version: Download
  
  
• Detailed description of functions: More…