What is live website tracking?

Live website tracking is the real-time logging and analysis of website visitor data. It is called "live" due to the fact that when reports are generated they are compiled from a database that the statistics are logged to directly from the website in real-time. So a user clicking from page A to page B at 13:04 can be seen to do so by anyone running off a report at 13:05.

The standard way for webmasters to review the performance of their website is by viewing reports generated from the webserver log files (see the knowledge base for a description of server log files). These "log reports" are generated (usually once a day) and provide information about such things as total number of page reads, total bandwidth used, most requested files, most popular requesting user agent etc.

Although many log analysis applications claim to be able to report accurate visitor statistics this is a misleading claim as the results produced are based on assumptions and are often grossly off the mark. See our page on webserver log files for more information on what can and cannot be extracted from this raw data.

Live website tracking applications log and analyse website traffic data in a different way. Although the data recorded and analysed is the same (with the exception of a few extra values made available through the use of client side scripting), the results of the data analysis are very different. Live tracking allows for a much deeper level of visitor analysis, providing much more accurate figures for total number of visitors and real returning visitors.

The way that live website tracking achieves this level of accuracy is by establishing a session for each visitor to the site. By using cookies the software is able to log to a database the exact path a visitor takes through a website and how long they spend on each page.

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