With the advent of server side scripting such as Active Server Pages (ASP) and then Parser Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), tracking all that comes with a hit was becoming possible.
I particularly remember working with the global.asa session variables in order to start tracking entry point, referrer URL, IP address, User Agent, search engines being used and most importantly keywords that led to your website - that was circa 1999.
At the time it was merely for development optimization purposes, IE 6 had not been released yet (way before 2002) and Netscape Navigator was still the browser for many corporations! The W3C had already started battling against discrepancies in rendering the web but we wanted to make sure our web pages were not broken the top browsers.
One of the early insights I clearly remember was for a music site that was getting a lot of visits from Italy. It led to the localization of its forum which was also set for the Romance language.
