Hit Counters: The Analytics Tool of the Early Web

However, this did leave these amateur web developers with one, obvious, burning question: How many people are looking at my website?

Enter the hit counter: basically the bluntest web analytics solution ever provided

Server Log Software

The earliest state of the art analytics solutions depended on reading and analyzing the server log. Every time someone views your web page, their browser makes an HTTP -- hypertext transfer protocol -- request for every file on your page, to the server each file is hosted on. A record of each request is kept in the server log.

Server log records keep track of many useful things: the person’s IP address, a timestamp of the request, the status of the request (whether it was successful, timed out, etc.), the number of bytes transferred, and the referring url -- the page the window displayed before making a request for your file.

In the late 1990s, tagging-based analytics companies started to proliferate. Some of these sold software similar to the old server log analytics packages: they used tags to track user behavior, but sent this data to a client-hosted and client-managed database. More common, though, were web-hosted-tag-based analytics solutions -- which stored your data in a web-hosted database, owned and managed by the analytics company.  
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