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Tracking Visitors
You also discover through a complimentary email message that Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan really liked your mouse trails tutorial; but, your hit counter didn't increment. How could that be? Well, did you put a counter on every single page of your site, or just on the home page? Rest assured, when the search engines spidered your pages, they didn't list all the keywords they found as belonging to your entry page. Folks, people actually do enter your site right smack dab in the middle. Ugh, you say, I hadn't counted on that. Trackers to the Rescue
What did you think? Impressive isn't it? You get a quick summary page telling you how many hits and page views you've had today, this week, and this month. You get visitor detail like when they came and what domain they were from. Want to know how many pages they looked at on your site while they were there? Check out the reload stats. You can see information about the browser they used, the operating system on their computer, what country they are from, and how big their monitor is. But best of all, you can determine how they found your site. Focus on the referrer statistics. That will tell you where they clicked from; whether it be a search engine — with the query terms they entered — or a link from one of your buddies. When you get good at this, you'll discover it's a lot of fun. More importantly, you can leverage this information in your business.
So what have we learned? Web site promotion involves statistical analysis of its effectiveness. You must determine what has helped, and what hasn't. Insure you are recording activity to every page of your site, not just the home page, whether it be with a free service or through your web host. Now, ditch that counter and get tracking! |
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You've made your first pass at promoting your
web site. You listed in all the important search engines, established link
partnerships with like-minded sites, perhaps started an opt-in newsletter, even
did some offline advertising. Count on doing that forever. But you also need to
know how effective your activities have been. The first thing you realize is that
counter you put on your home page doesn't tell you a thing. Let's see, you had 78
hits today. Great, now who were they? Don't know? OK, where did they come from?
Who sent them? You mean I can find that out?
Get rid of your counter. It serves no productive
purpose. If the numbers are low, people think your site isn't popular. If the numbers
are high, people think you lie. Most of all, they don't tell you a thing you need to
know about your site's traffic. That is where trackers come in. If you are using one
of the free web hosting services, you can also get free tracker software. There are
several good ones available, just do a search for free web site tracking.
Internet Brothers uses 
There is, however, one missing piece of the
puzzle. How do you know where they entered your site? You could setup a separate account
for every single page of your site, but that would be tedious, and wouldn't really
be fair to the free tracking service. For this information, you truly need your own
domain, like internetbrothers.com. Generally, all web hosts provide tracking
software when you open an account with your own domain. Since the tracking is then
done on the server, rather than in the browser client like with Extreme, you can
also now determine the entry page. Great information to know. You can tell potential
advertisers "this is my hottest page", and adjust rates accordingly. You
can find out what interests your guests about the site and put even more development
effort into that area.
