This question may expose my ignorance as a web developer, but that wouldn't exactly be a bad thing for me now would it?

I have the need to store user-state information. Examples of information that I need to store per user. (define user: unauthenticated visitor)

1. User arrived to the site from google/bing/yahoo
2. User utilized the search feature (true/false)
3. List of previous visited product pages on current visit

It is my understanding that I could store this in the view state, but that causes a problem with page load from the end-users' perspective because a significant amount of non-viewable information is being transferred to and from the end-users even though the server is the only side that needs the info.

On a similar note, it is my understanding that the session state can be used to store such information, but does not this also result in the same information being transferred to the user and stored in their cookie? (Not quite as bad as viewstate, but it does not feel ideal).

This leaves me with either a server-only-session storage system or a mem-caching solution.

Is memcached the only good option here?