The Stages of Web Site Tracking
Web site tracking consists of three stages: gathering the data, analyzing the data, and reporting on the data.
The data gathering stage consists of parsing your Web servers’ log files into a common format at scheduled intervals. For NetTracker to work, you must have access to your log files. Your Webmaster or ISP should be able to help you gain access to these files.
Once the data has been gathered, it needs to be analyzed. During the data analysis stage, complex heuristics are applied to the raw data to sessionize the data into visits and page views instead of simply hits. Once the data has been analyzed, it is placed in a database to facilitate reporting.
The final stage of Web site tracking is generating reports (including graphs) from the analyzed data. During this stage, the analyzed visit and page view data is read from the database and tabulated into many different reports, each answering a specific question. For example, a report on what people viewed on a Web site might consist of the pages that were viewed, how many times each page was viewed, and how long, on average, visitors spent looking at each page.