Tracking Your Web Site Visitors

Tracking visitors to your Web site is one of the most fundamental aspects of understanding how the Web site works for you. It is an excellent means of determining where to spend your advertising dollars, which pages provide good information to your visitors, and in deciding how to improve your site. To interpret the behavior of visitors to your site, you need to purchase a software package or pay for a hosted service that measures visitor statistics.

There are traffic analysis services, form very expensive high-end packages to simple services that offer basic information. If you are new to site usage tracking, it’s a good idea to review the industry leaders to be sure that you know what they offer, and to make sure that you are clear about the type of information that is important to you.

While tracking software can give you a lot of information, from where you have broken links and which pages rarely get viewed, the most important benefit is that it can show you how a sale is made. Once you see the process that a customer goes through to purchase your product or service, you can streamline the route to make closing the sale. The money you spend on tracking software, combined with the time it takes to use it wisely, can produce a better experience for your visitors, and valuable results to you.

Tracking programs and Web bugs

Whether you are purchasing software to place on your network, or subscribing to a traffic analysis service, the functions of the software and the methods they use are similar from one to another. That is because the basic information that they have to work with is largely the same. Whenever a page is requested by a visitor to your site (by typing in your URL or clicking a link to one of your pages), your Web server records information about that request.

From that information, the tracking programs analyze, interpret, and report traffic activities, providing such information as:

• The number of visitors to your site, by day and time of day
• The average number of page views per visitor—a high number would indicate that the average visitors go deep inside the site, most probably because they like it or find it useful
• Average duration—the length of a user’s visit or a visit to a single page
• Some information on geographically where your visitors come from
• Most and least requested pages
• Top paths—a path is the sequence of pages viewed by visitors from entry to exit
• Referrers—which sites are generating the most traffic to a particular page on your site

Once you purchase the software or sign up for a hosted site, you will most likely add a small chunk of HTML or some other code to your Web pages. That code helps your particular tracking program to collect traffic information. While this may seem like an invasion of the visitor’s privacy, it is important to remember that this basic traffic information is captured on every Web site by the Web server itself. It does not obtain any personally identifying information, such as name, telephone number, physical or e-mail address. It is simply gathering information about site usage.

When a visitor comes to your site, these anonymous details are used by the software. They are compiled into statistics and delivered in report form for easy viewing. You can use this these reports in many different ways to understand and improve your site traffic, navigation and content.

Perhaps the most interesting information that you can get from your site is a “conversion” rate: that is, the results of a visit, whether it resulted in the desired action, in most cases, a sale. Whether you are selling products online, or whether to you the measure of success is simply delivering certain information to your audience, knowing how a customer gets from the first page to the payoff gives you a better clue how to best design your Web site to increase this conversion rate.

Specific visitor tracking programs

The table below is far from comprehensive; there are too many tracking services to list. This is a short list of a few with which we are familiar. On the lower cost end is StatCounter. In the middle of the market is WebTrends 7, Index Tools and many others. Urchin, recently acquired by Google, is by far the most feature rich in our industry.

Though each contains its own special features, Web trackers show you how people found your site, how they explored it and how you can enhance the visitor experience.

Name	Type	Price	Capabilities
Google Analytics	Hosted service or software	Free, with upgrades available	E-commerce analysis Estimates ROI for CPC Assigns per visitor value Increased segmentation Date range comparison
Index Tools	Hosted service	Staring at $19.95 a month	Real time reporting Live cost analysis Custom reports Scenario analysis
Statcounter	Hosted service	Free, with upgrades available	Search engine traffic Keyword analysis Geo-location
WebTrends	Hosted service or software	Starting at $895 for software or $35/month for hosted service	1st party cookie tracking Fully customizable Visual diagrams On-demand service

How visitor tracking works

For explanation purposes, Urchin will be used to show how some Web tracking works. Urchin has five different methods for identifying visitors and sessions, depending on available information. Of these, the Urchin Traffic Monitor (UTM) is a highly accurate system that was specifically designed to identify unique visitors, sessions, exact paths, and return frequency behavior. There are a number of visitor loyalty and client reports that are only available when using the UTM System. The UTM System is easy to install and is highly recommended for all businesses. In addition to the UTM System, Urchin can use IP addresses, user-agents, usernames, and session IDs to identify sessions.

The UTM Sensor is a small chunk of JavaScript code that accomplishes two important functions. First, the Sensor negates the effects of caching by forcing at least one hit to progress to the original Web server for each page view. The impact on the server is minimal, and the details about the additional hit are logged into the normal Web log files resulting in a more complete data set. Secondly, the UTM Sensor uniquely identifies each visitor by using client-side “1st party” cookies to keep track of first time and returning visitors. This cookie identifier is a communication tag only viewable to your Web server in the same nature as session IDs. It is not a third party cookie, which provides information outside your system, violating many privacy policies.

These more advanced functions are not available through every Web tracker, but are essential for the most complete results. Using a Web tracking tool can enhance your Web site development and make for the most efficient use of your site by your customers. Tracking your visitors is one of the most influential methods through which you can understand how well your Web achieves its goals. Start with great Web site design centered on the experience that you want to provide to your customers, then use these tools to make sure that it works.