Web logging was originally designed for Web engineers to diagnose problems and measure total throughput, not to provide insights that could improve the marketing performance of a site. If the data the marketer wants is logged at all, it has to be mapped to a readable form. But the most useful marketing data isn't recorded at all. Web-server manufacturers have added mechanisms to log referrer data, but this data is stored differently on the various servers. Because much of the information a marketer needs is not available in logs, specialized monitors have emerged to observe higher-level events and deliver more relevant data.
Monitors can track events in Web servers, network interfaces, or e-commerce engines.
We'll talk about category and cluster modeling, two different techniques that traffic analyzers use to segment visitors. Finally, we'll outline the key steps to use to decide which traffic analyzers are appropriate for you. Server APIs are proprietary, so the events and data seen by server monitors depend on the Web server release. Some data isn't available to server monitors. The Web server then interrupts the transmission of the page being sent.