Three Principal ways to measure Overall internet usage in the form of Web Statistics

Basically there are three principal ways to measure internet usage

a)     user centric

b)     website centric

c)     network centric

User-Centric Internet Usage Measurement

User-Centric Internet Usage Measurement involves convincing users to install software which track most of there information’s. For example – Browser toolbar this is one of the most obvious approaches.  But toolbars have some limitations they can track standard websites only.  Best example for this is Alexa

The second approach is to convince user to install an application which tracks both browser and other internet application usage.

Panel based measurement takes this approach. In some cases the users are well aware of their participation in a panel (and may alter their behavior accordingly); in other cases, users have chosen to install software to receive a specific benefit – the user might not be aware of the software’s true purpose.

Website-Centric Internet Usage Measurement

Website-Centric Internet Usage Measurement is at the website level, it involves the complete involvement of webmaster or a website user to place tracking code on there website or provide log details to  specific software’s.   Two popular web analytics software working on this approach are:

Google Analytics (Page – Tagging, Tracking Code)
Urchin,  AwStats (Log base web analytics software)

Network-Centric Internet Usage Measurement

Network-Centric data is intercepting data between users and websites at the network level potentially offers sample sizes which are much larger than traditional panels (but smaller than the data sample available through collection directly at a website).

So the ISPs (internet service providers) comes into picture here.