Web Analytics: JavaScript vs. Web Log

Gordon Choi | July 13, 2012

What analytics tools have you been relying on for understanding the traffic, users, and customers of your website? In reality you can rely on web analytics that are either:

• Web log-based
• JavaScript-based

Web Log-Based Analytics

Web log-based means you are getting the web/traffic data directly from your web server’s log files.

• Web log captures a gigantic amount of data that most of the time even exceeds what you actually require. It captures every click a user makes on your web page. It records when your server returns a CSS file to the client.

• It’s a pain to clean up the raw data of even a small web log file. To make it worse, every day, every hour, and every minute, your log file’s size adds up. So processing your web log files can be very painful (and take a very long time) if you are running a website that has billions of page views per day.

• A software/web engineer is probably needed to write automatic script to pre-process your daily log files (before the data becomes anything meaningful to you) that would also depend on how you have configured your web servers to capture user data to your web log files.

• After all these pains, you will still require your data warehouse experts and web analysts to store the web log data in some pre-planned database structures and put the data up as readable reports for human beings.

Many SEO experts would think otherwise about web log-based analytics. One great benefit that they can get from web log is the behavior of search engine spiders. Knowing this information is essential for them to deal with many difficult SEO issues.

JavaScript-Based Analytics

Benefits of using JavaScript-based web analytics:

1. URL-based: This means when your website’s URL is planned in a way that makes sense for users and search engines, your web analytics tool shouldn’t have problems showing them back to you in the reports.

2. Cookies-based: Tracking each visitor’s behavior is becoming more and more important for your web business’s success, and a cookie more or less represents a single person (or visitor).

3. Easy installation with JavaScript tags: All you usually do is add the same piece of JavaScript tag onto every page of your website, and your web analytics setup is more than half-way done.

4. Allows customized setup to capture more user actions/events: JavaScript-based tag doesn’t track when a user visits a page whether one of the CSS file actually fires up, but with some customization codes (e.g., Google Analytics allows some customization) you can track keywords of some specific Chinese search engines (that aren’t already in the default list of Google Analytics).

5. No/minimal data storage issue: For example, your website’s traffic data is actually hosted on some servers that belong to Google, if you are using Google Analytics. You will not be required to spend time and labor in maintaining the servers, handling the technical issues, and cleaning up the raw data.

However, JavaScript-based web analytics has shortcomings:

• No search engine spider or bot data is captured, e.g., Googlebot, baiduspide.

• No page error data can be captured.

• Some web pages that are already heavily loaded with JavaScript may cause your web analytics tools to lose track of data.

• Some browsers in the world still don’t support JavaScript, so it means no data being captured by your web analytics tools.

Examples of Web Analytics (JavaScript-Based)

Global web analytics tools that are available to users for free:

• Google Analytics: Google has always been maintaining the data lifecycles of “give-and-get” with its users.

• Yahoo Web Analytics: Unfortunately Yahoo has decided to retire this tool, as the company’s direction is no longer to develop sophisticated and free web analytics tools.

Global web analytics tools that are only available when you pay to use them:

• Adobe/Omniture Site Catalyst
• There are many more paid web analytics tools that are similar to Site Catalyst

Examples of Web Analytics in China (JavaScript-Based)

Global web analytics tool that is available as a self-installed and open-source project:

• Piwik

For the Internet world especially in China:

• Baidu Analytics (百度统计): Baidu has been proactively providing its web analytics tools to its users.

China-based web analytics tools that are only available when you pay to use them, and they are the best ones from within China that I have seen so far (if you know of other great China-based web analytics tools, please don’t hesitate to let me know):

• 99Click.com
• Gridsum.com

Tags: Analytics, JavaScript

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About the Author

Gordon Choi is a bilingual search marketer and web analyst who has worked for Ctrip.com and Alibaba.com in China, and Clicks2Customers.com in South Africa. He has gathered his search experience (paid search marketing and search engine optimization) in both the Chinese and global markets since 2002 by integrating analytics systems and managing hundreds of thousands of search marketing dollars. Connect with Gordon on Google+.

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Web Analytics: JavaScript vs. Web Log

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