Visitor Tracking on your website..
Tracking and assessing your sites visitors is very important if you want a successful website. We recommend that every website should have a comprehensive website visitor tracking, analysis and reporting solution.
- This is an essential component of your internet strategy.
- You need to know how your site is performing.
- You need to be able to measure the effect of changes to your site.
We can incorporate a simple tracking solution into your web site strategy for you.
If you are looking for suitable tools to enable you to do this yourself then you will find a few of our favourites on our Tools page.
There are any number of tools and services; however they all fall into one of two categories.
- Log file Analyser
- Real Time Statistics
Are all web site statistical reports created equal? Log Analyzers and Real-Time Statistics reports track site activity in very different ways. As a result, they collect different information and may not always match. For example, real-time stats are much better at tracking unique visitors and give a much more accurate page view count. Gaining a greater understanding of how these systems track and report stats will help you better reconcile the difference between the two techniques. Also, by understanding the differences you will be in a better position to interpret the results and make more effective decisions about your business.
Log File Analyzer
Your internet servers create a record of the traffic and information requests in log files. These log files include information on errors, processing time, bandwidth used, visitor IP address, where visitors came from (referred) along with additional information such as operating system or browser used.
Website statistics that use log data typically install on a server behind your firewall and read your log files on a periodic basis. They interpret the data and provide a snapshot report in a readable format of the information contained in your log file.
Real Time Statistics
Another method of analyzing your web site activity is to update an optimized reporting database each time a visitor comes to your site. This method requires you to place a small JavaScript on every web page that is to be tracked. This code is invisible to your site visitors. As visitors surf your site the code places a cookie on their computer so they are tracked as unique.
Within seconds of placing this code on your site information about your visitors is securely written out to a database and is instantly available for reporting. Because the database is optimized for reporting information such as what marketing campaign referred the visitor or what their order value is can now be captured. Because the data is real-time you do not have to wait for a snapshot report.
Deciding which of these two types of service will be most suitable may require some assistance. We are happy to give FREE informal advice to help you find the best solution. Contact us for assistance.
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