Horizon Hosting

Support guide

Choosing web analytics

Choose useful website reporting while considering privacy, consent and the questions you need to answer.

What is web analytics?

Web analytics is the collection and reporting of website traffic. It helps you understand how people find your site, which pages they use and how your website is performing.

Three common approaches answer different questions and collect different levels of visitor data:

Server log analysisUses records created by the web server. It includes visits from people, search engines and automated bots.
Privacy-focused analyticsUses lightweight reporting designed to collect less visitor data, often without cross-site tracking.
Page-tagging platformsUse tracking code added to your pages for detailed visitor journeys, campaign attribution and conversion reporting.

Which approach should I use?

Start with the questions you need to answer. Server reports help with raw traffic and hosting usage. Privacy-focused tools cover common audience and page-performance questions. Full page-tagging platforms provide more detailed campaign and conversion reporting.

Collect only what you need

Choose the least intrusive tool that answers your business questions. Check whether your setup requires a privacy notice, cookie consent or changes to how tracking loads.

How do I get started?

  1. 1
    Define the useful measures

    List the pages, enquiries, sales or campaigns you need to evaluate before choosing a tool.

  2. 2
    Review the data collected

    Check cookies, personal information, retention settings and any consent requirements.

  3. 3
    Install and test the tool

    Add the required tracking, record it in your privacy information and confirm the reports are receiving the expected events.