Hitbox was a popular

web counter A web counter or hit counter is a publicly displayed running tally of the number of visits a webpage has received. Web counters are usually displayed as an inline digital image or in plain text. Image rendering of digits may use a variety of ...

and

web analytics Web analytics is the measurement, data collection, collection, analysis, and reporting of web Data (computing), data to understand and optimize web usage. Web analytics is not just a process for measuring web traffic but can be used as a tool fo ...

product created by

WebSideStory WebSideStory, Inc. (later Visual Sciences), was founded by Blaise Barrelet in 1996 as web analytics tool and link directory; its products were Hitbox and HBX. The company went public on September 28, 2004 (NASDAQ: WSSI). In 2006, WebSideStory acq ...

, until taken over by

Omniture Omniture is an online marketing and web analytics business unit in Orem, Utah. It was acquired by Adobe Systems in 2009. Until 2011, Omniture operated as a business unit within Adobe as the "Omniture Business Unit", but as of 2012 Adobe began reti ...

(subsequently taken over by

Adobe Adobe ( ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for ''mudbrick''. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is used to refer to any kind of e ...

), originally for

adult entertainment The sex industry (also called the sex trade) consists of businesses that either directly or indirectly provide sex-related products and services or adult entertainment. The industry includes activities involving direct provision of sex-related ...

websites. It was widely used by commercial & other organizations across a variety of industrial sectors as a complete and integrated metrics solution for monitoring web traffic and driving marketing. Adobe plans to completely phase it out by moving all their clients to their flagship product, SiteCatalyst. Companies place

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

files on their web servers which are linked to from a HTML script in the page code. The combination of the two makes a request from the data collection servers for each page viewed by a user. A

cookie A cookie is a baked or cooked snack or dessert that is typically small, flat and sweet. It usually contains flour, sugar, egg, and some type of oil, fat, or butter. It may include other ingredients such as raisins, oats, chocolate chips, n ...

is placed on the users computer which contains a unique id. This unique id is passed with the request to the data collection servers. During the processing of the data Hitbox ties together the page views to get a perspective of how the user moved through the site. Other, custom information can be passed in the request as well as information from the HTTP header of the browser, such as referrer and browser details. Some Web Analytics services have been declared spyware by several anti-spyware organizations.

References

* * Web analytics {{www-stub