WEB ANALYTIC SOFTWARE

Web analytic software is complete web solution that provides a foundation for analysis tools to run and operate.
Having an efficient web analytics software in place, is very important because without such software, it would be impossible to develop a roadmap to assess the performance of a website. It is this software that provides support and configuration for all the metrics and tools that are used by an analyst to determine the number of visitors landing on a page, navigating it, interacting on it and finally, recording an action.

There are many types of software, that can be used for web analytics. These fall under the following categories.

Self Hosted Software

1. Free/Open source software
Free or open source software is issued under a free software license and can be downloaded and customized by anyone using it. Such software is ideal for companies and websites that undergo very rapid development and want to add and omit analytic features on a regular basis.
Most of these software programs are issued under the GNU or GPL, General Public License. This means webmasters and analysts are free to modify it, use it and share it whenever they want. Some of the most popular choices in this category include:

1. AWStats
2. Crawl Track
3. Webalizer
4. Piwik
5. W3Perl

2. Proprietary software
Unlike open source software, proprietary software is owned by a company or a group of developers. Also known as closed source software, web analytic programs developed under this umbrella are a licensed product with a legal copyright holder. These cannot be modified or shared.
This software is regularly updated by the developing company to keep abreast with the changing needs of website owners. They run on different types of platforms like PHP, Windows, Linux and JavaScript.
Proprietary web analytic software has to be purchased from authentic dealers.

Hosted Software
Hosted software are centrally located on a common server and distributed to users via a subscription plan. Such software is also termed as ‘on-demand software’ because it is available on a delivery model, which necessitates that the program in question should be wanted by the user.

Most of the famous software in this category use cookies to track visitor activities on a website and usually have various versions for mobiles and tablets as well.
The use of any one of the above types depends on the need for performance of the website owner and the depth of analysis required.