Why Analytics?

First there were log files and only people who bought really expensive software
could figure out what the heck the half-million lines of incomprehensible
gobbledygook really meant. The rest of us used web-page counters. Anyone
could see how many people had come to a page. As long as the counter didn’t
crash, or corrupt its storage, or overflow and start again at zero, there would
be a nifty little graphic of numbers that looked like roller skates (or pool balls
or stadium scoreboard numbers or whatnot).
Around 1998, the arbiters of taste on the Internet (i.e., everybody) decided
that page counters were so 1997 and that there must be a better way.
And also about that time, web site statistics packages or “stats” came into
common use—not common use by huge businesses that could afford thousands
of dollars for software but common use by us peons who rent our web
space from hosting companies for as little as $5 a month. Stats packages basically
collect data but leave you to analyze that data. So they tell you what happens;
they just don’t put what happens into any type of business context.
If you have Windows-based hosting, you may have a Windows-specific
stats package, or your host may use the Windows version of one of the open
source stats packages. If you have hosting on a Linux web server running
Apache (and about 60 percent of web servers run Linux and Apache), you’ll
most likely have Analog, Webalizer, or AWStats, and you may have all three.
These software packages are open source under various versions of the GNU
Public License (GPL). This neatly explains their ubiquity.