You can set things up so that every hit to one, some, or all of your pages is recorded.

This will give you a lot of useful information. Some potentially useful information, however, is not immediately available, and some information that you get won't tell you very much. For example:

• You generally can identify the machine, and the type of browser, that someone was using when they came to your page.
• You sometimes can identify the page someone was on immediately before they came to yours.
• You generally cannot identify exactly who the person is who has hit on your page (at least, not without asking directly, or setting up a login & password system, which is beyond the scope of this workshop).

As long as you understand the limitations of the data thus available, you will still be able to use log-generated data to:

• Identify certain kinds of errors in your pages.
• Find out some things about where hits are coming from.
• Identify which pages get used, and which don't.

You will also discover that a reasonable number of hits are due to web crawlers and search engines, not specific interest in your pages. But your logs of search engine data may help you understand:

• How searches that reach your pages are formed, and
• How you might modify your pages to make it easier to search for them.