Often, in order to keep track of these traffic statistics a webmaster will use some sort of script or program which monitors visitors and creates reports based on their needs. These scripts can range in size and complexity from a simple hit counter on a page, to a fully integrated data-mining application. They can also range in price from free unsupported scripts, to thousands of dollars for an integrated system. In many cases though, the first option is relatively useless, and the second is unnecessary (and usually outside of the budget). As is true with many things in life, the best solution is usually somewhere in between.
Learn how you can create a small and simple PHP script to log your visitors activity into a file. You just need to add 1 line to each of your page to enable logging and the statistics will be collected in a html file so you don't have to setup any database for this task.
You can get quite a bit of information about your visitors without having to use a third party tracking software. I'll outline the PHP commands you can use to capture some of this data. The details you capture can be saved into a database, and retrieved later to check your site's performance and user details. The following information is captured using the server variable ($_SERVER) which is available from PHP 4.10 onwards.
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