If the site's host does not offer software for reviewing the site logs, we must install such software, because it's important to track the results of our marketing efforts. Web traffic software tends to be either free or very expensive. In fact WebTrends is among the least expensive of the Web traffic software programs. The number of hits is actually the number of files viewed on the site. Since each page is one file, and each picture on the page is another file, you can see that one visitor viewing one page with three graphics will be recorded as four hits by the traffic software.
Webmasters like to know how their visitors arrived at the site.
Web traffic software gives us the list of Referring Pages where we can see how many visitors typed the address, how many came from Yahoo, how many came from Google, etc. We can evaluate this list of referrers to help determine our future marketing. If we record our Web site traffic on a regular basis, we can see whether our number of visitors is increasing. When we record our latest online marketing efforts, our traffic analysis allows us to measure the effectiveness of our marketing efforts.