|
|
What are site counters? In principle, they're a type of web site statistic. They aren't supposed to be in competition with web server log files. Rather, they provide additional and differentiated data, such as how often a button was clicked or whether an advertising banner has attracted visitors.
Site counters consist of three key elements: a couple of web controls that provide the essential statistical values, and a front-end for the evaluation of these statistics. Both are based on the Site Counter API.
The so-called page counters are a subfeature of site counters. The number of accesses on certain pages or on all pages is logged similarly to the log files of a web server.
The storage of all the gathered statistics is again taken care of by a place provider model. Providers for Access and SQL Server are included in the shipment, and Access is used by default. Because web sites with a high number of visitors will result in huge data volumes, the provider should be changed and SQL Server (or at least the MSDE version) should be used. Both providers offer data caching so that new values will be gathered and written to the database only every x seconds.
|
|