In an effort to make websites more efficient as well as make them more attractive to online visitors, web analytics is seen as an important tool to use to achieve better traffic. Web analytics is the study of how website visitors behave.

Web analytics also refers to the use of data that is collected from a certain website that helps determine which parts of the site achieve their objectives from a business standpoint.

For business and e-commerce websites, web analytics is an important tool to use to further improve website efficiency as well as increase online sales. There are two known ways in which web analytics data are being collected.  One way is through logfile analysis where a web server collects and records all the transactions that comes through a website. This is then kept in a logfile that is later on read in order to have an idea of online visitor behavior.

During the 1990's, web servers have always recorded transactions in log files. But it was not then used as data to study visitor behavior. But later on, website owners realize that such data can be sued to help determine the popularity of a website. It was then that web log analysis software was developed in order to handle this data.

In the 90's, collecting website statistics consists only of counting the number of visitor hits that are made to the web server for a particular website. This was then sufficient since early websites only consist of simple HTML file.

But as the Web developed, so did the way the websites were designed. As websites began using images as well as taking multiple HTML files, the methods of counting hits in order to get an accurate visitor count has become less dependable. This paved the way for the first log analyzer to be developed. It allowed a more effective measure of counting the amount of human activity that comes into a web server.

There were two ways used to gauge the number of hits on web servers. One way is through page views while another is through session visits. A page view is a request that is made to a web page from a server while a session visit is usually a sequence of requests that that comes form a uniquely identified client that expires after some time of inactivity.

Although both types of metrics are still used today, they are considered as simple tools that may not provide all the web analytics needs due to the growing sophistication of websites.