web stats : Java Glossary

The crucial stats of interest when applying for an affiliate program are number of unique visitors, the number of visitors and the number of page hits per hour/day/month.

There are several ways to keep track of how many people are visiting your site:

• Put hit counters on individual pages.
• Analyse your Tomcat stats with WebaLizer.
• Use a third party service like WebTarantula or Amazon’s Alexa. I don’t know where they get their raw data, but WebTarantula was able to tell me that 20% of my visitors come from India, 13% from the USA and only 4% from my native Canada. My assumptions were quite different.
• Use software like Webstat to collect and display detailed stats. You must embed a snippet of Webstat-provided JavaScript on every web page. When the page loads, it sends a message to the WebStat server. It can’t thus track image or zip loads. It also means your visitors must have a compatible JavaScript interpreter enabled. This is free for under 20,000 tracked hits a month and for 20,000 to 30,000 and up for higher volumes. You could, in theory, keep under your hits under the 20,000 free limit by tracking only some of your pages. You can get a free two-week trial to ensure the system is sufficiently responsive and works to your satisfaction. This technique is not as efficient as server-side tracking, but it has the advantage it requires no co-operation from your ISP (Internet Service Provider).