Track
Your Visitors
Although many people are happy to
have just a visitor counter
on their website, to indicate the volume of traffic which comes their
way, this information can often be misleading, as many visitor counters
do not provide any access to daily statistics, or how many of those
visitors have never been to your site before.
Most
of
the
website hosting companies provide their
own tools for viewing statistics about visitors to your website, such
as the number of pages which are viewed, the number of new and
returning visitors, and the most popular pages to be visited.
However, these tools do not tend to be very user friendly and may only
provide a list of the top 10 for each entry. They certainly do
not tend to provide information about the servers used by your
visitors, or how they move through your website.
For this,
you need much more complex tracking tools - this can then be used to
target your marketing and website design to the actual types of
people who visit your website and the sort of information which they
are looking for.
Track Your Visitors Properly
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IndexTools strives to correct these
short-comings by providing a nice graphical interface which tracks your
visitors by the aid of a small amount of javascript added to each web
page which you wish to track.
Once
you
apply
to their program and add the javascript to your
web-pages, IndexTools collates data about every visitor to your
website, noting whether they have been to your website before, and
tracking each page on your website which that person visits, together
with a note of the time that they spend on your website. This
enables you to see the movement of visitors as they navigate through
your website. Even if the visitor has cookies and javascript
disabled, IndexTools is still able to note that they visited your
website, although you cannot track their movements through the site.
IndexTools also automatically
changes the numerical IP addresses of the server used by visitors into
real server names which can prove useful for targeted marketing.
As an example of this, we were able to tell
Forbidden Technologies, who provide video streaming solutions, that
several visitors from
LucasFilm had spent quite some time reading our review of their
technology and hence suggested a potential customer. Knowing the
server from which the customer has come can therefore prove valuable
commercial information.
IndexTools allows you to judge how effective
marketing campaigns are, as for each visitor, the program tracks
whether they have directly accessed your website or come from another
page, such as a site which lists a link to your own website, or a
search engine. If the visitor has come from a search engine, the
details of the search string which had been entered by the visitor are
also stored, for later analysis.
Although
many Hosting providers already provide website statistics on search
engine referrals and links from external websites (often limited to the
top 10 referrals), they are often misleading, as they will include data
on visits from your own staff (who may, for example, be testing
links). Indextools allows you to reduce such errors, by blocking certain IP addresses.
If
you
subscribe
to
either the Premium or eBusiness edition of the
program, a note is also kept of any files which are downloaded from
your website, and also which exit links a visitor clicks on (when
leaving the site), which can therefore be useful to analyse the
effectiveness of any affiliate programs
to which you subscribe. The eBusiness edition, even
allows you to add your own user-defined actions which can be tracked by
the Javascript.
You
are
even
able
to set up campaign tracking parameters, to allow you to
amass information on any advertising campaigns which you may use to
promote your website. This is easy to set up and allows you to
specify a name for each campaign and assign them to different reporting
categories. You then add details of either a specific page which
your campaign is designed to attract visitors to, or the name of a
referring URL from where your visitors will come if attracted by your
advertising.
All
of
the
information
collated by IndexTools can later be analysed by
authorised users, and can be sorted according to daily, weekly, monthly
or annual statistics (or a custom period). Pages visited can
be displayed by reference to their HTML title, or by the web page
address.
All
of
this
information
can be very useful to see the effects of your
marketing campaigns and what attracts users to your website. We
ourselves have used the information to hone the keywords used for each
of our web-pages as well as re-wording some of the web-pages to make
some information that is regularly searched for, easier to find and at
the same time, altering some of the text to try and deter people from
looking at the wrong web-page for certain information.
There
are
two
versions
of
IndexTools available:
-
The E-Business edition (from $49.95pm) caters for 50,000 page
views per month, provides visitor tracking, allows you to set up
several users who are able to access the account and exclude your own
visits, as well as sending automatic scheduled reports by email.
You can also have 3 websites under the one account, track downloads and
exit links, SSL tracking (for secure areas of a website) and even trend
analysis.
-
The Enterprise edition (from $249pm), is the same as the
E-Business edition, but allows you to track user-defined actions and
perform conversion ratio analysis as well as more tracking tools.
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