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

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.