Monitoring and Tracking

In this addition we will discuss the importance web site
tracking and explain to you why it is so important to pay
attention your current web traffic.

Understanding what your visitors do on your site is crucial
information, not to mention interesting. If your visitors
proceed to purchase a product but then a large majority
leave the site when they get to a specific page in the order
process then you need to know about it. It could be that
this page is confusing or hard to use. Fixing it could
increase your sales by 200%. This is just an example; there
are many reasons why you want a detailed analysis of your
site visitors.

Most website hosting services offer a stats package that you
can study. If you're not sure where this is, call up your
hosting service and ask them. Statistics are a vital part of
tracking your marketing progress. If you don't have access
to website statistics get a package that can help you in
this area. Do not get a counter that just shows how many
visitors you've had. You'll be missing out on vital
information that can help strengthen weaknesses in your
site.

A good website hosting service would offer traffic logs that
provide an invaluable insight into the traffic being
referred to a web site from various sources such as search
engines, directories and other links.

Unfortunately traffic tracking provided by web hosting
services is often in the form of raw traffic log files or
other difficult to understand cryptic formats. These log
files are basically text files that describe actions on the
site. It is literally impossible to use the raw log files to
understand what your visitors are doing. If you do not have
the patience to go through these huge traffic logs, opting
for a traffic-logging package would be a good idea.

Basically two options are available to you and these are:
using a log analysis package or subscribing to a remotely
hosted traffic logging service. A remotely hosted traffic
logging service may be easy to use and is generally the
cheaper option of the two. WebTrends Live and HitsLink are
two good, remotely hosted, traffic-monitoring services worth
considering. However, WebTrends Live is a more complicated
system and is suitable for larger ecommerce websites.
“SuperStats” is another recommended traffic logging service.

These services do not use your log files. Typically a small
section of code is placed on any page you want to track.
When the page is viewed, information is stored on the remote
server and available in real time to view in charts and
tables form.

Log analysis packages are typically expensive to buy and
complex to set up. Apart from commercial packages there are
also some free log analysis packages available, such as
Analog.