Web traffic software measures website activity and provides insights into visitor trends. Users add a code to each page, with data collected and processed by a monitoring service. Costs vary, and the level of detail required depends on the user’s needs. Real-time monitoring is a recent development.
Web traffic software is an online application or service designed to measure the activity of visitors to a website and break it down into trends. It allows website owners to both measure the overall success of the site, to know what content people like the most, and to learn more about the type of people who visit the site. Choosing the right web traffic software depends on the detail of information you want, the frequency of updates, and the time and money you need to spend.
Most web traffic software works the same way. The user places a small section of code on each page of the site. This code means that every time someone visits the page, information is sent to a traffic monitoring service. The service then collects and processes the data, with the website owner being able to log into an account and see the results.
In some configurations, the user does not add the code or get the results online. Instead, the user downloads visitor logs from the company that hosts the website, then uses a standalone application to analyze this data. This can give you more control over the analysis, but can be more work-intensive.
Web traffic software costs can vary enormously. Freeware software or services are free, although you may need to watch advertisements when checking the results. Shareware or trialware allows free limited access, such as an analysis of the last 500 visits to a site, but charges a fee for unlimited use. Paid web traffic services may involve a one-time payment, a monthly fee, or a variable fee depending on the amount of data involved. Which option is best depends on both your budget and the type of traffic analysis required.
The ideal situation with web traffic software is to get answers to the questions you think are important, without getting bogged down in unnecessary detail and complexity. It is therefore important to decide what you actually need from the software. For some people, just getting the number of visitors to each page might be enough. For others, it may be critical to know what operating system or browser visitors are using, which can affect the technology used on the site. Other site owners may be more interested in the location of visitors as this could influence marketing plans.
The most recent development in web traffic software is real-time monitoring. Previously, most traffic analysis was done on batches of data, such as the set of visits for each day, meaning reports were always covered up to the previous day. Some services available now will constantly analyze the data, meaning users can see results up to the current second. This can be useful for time-sensitive sites like news sites that track the most popular articles so they can be better promoted. There are even rumors that some sites publish a story twice under two different titles, wait to see which one draws more visits, then drop the other.
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