5 ms·

>Page views Why are people using client side (even more, 3rd party) code for this? The server knows it, you can get it from the logs.

• dbbk 5y ago
  Not if you're behind an edge cache (which you should be)
  • snowwrestler 5y ago
    Some edge cache providers will give you logs of all requests.
• snowwrestler 5y ago
  Because we only care about pages that a client viewed.
• Tenoke 5y ago
  Not everything is on a server you control (e.g. my blog is on Github pages), and not everything reaches the server with caching. Also it takes less time to setup.
• technobabbler 5y ago
  You might serve from a CDN, the CDN might not log at that granularity (at least not visibly to you as an enduser), maybe you want to dedupe refreshes/navigation (sessions), maybe people behind a NAT matter to you (when they share an IP), maybe you want to filter out bot traffic (not trivial), maybe you don't want to have to deal with log rotation and backups or want to install a GUI parser for your marketing people... a whole lot of things that are difficult to implement yourself vs dropping in one 3rd-party script and calling it a day. Google Analytics or its competitors take a few minutes to set up. Recreating that whole stack to feature parity would take forever.