It seems that every other web site
we visit has some sort of hit counter on the main page, supposedly telling
us how many people have been there before us. This week we're going to
address this popular trend, explain why you don't need one, and what you
should be doing instead.
Most Internet marketers will normally implement
a hit counter on their site for one or both of two reasons -- to give
them a rough estimate of the number of visitors, and/or to give visitors
the impression that their site is popular and thus worthy of a good look.
Let's consider the first reason. There is
nothing wrong with wanting to know how many people have visited your web
site, in fact it's something that you really do need to know. But putting
a visible hit counter on your home page is not the answer, especially
not one of those free services.
For one thing, the free services require
you to in some way promote their site. For another, they are normally
slow and increase the time it takes for your pages to load. But most importantly,
a hit counter doesn't provide you with all of the information you need.
Just look at any of the top web sites on
the Internet. We promise that you will not find a visible hit counter
on any of them! That alone should tell you that the common hit counter
is worthless. If a visible counter was worthwhile, don't you think Yahoo
or Infoseek would have one?
You just can't win with a visible hit counter.
If your site does not get many visitors, all it's going to do is make
sure that the visitors you do get know that they are not visiting a popular
site. If anything, all this will do is discourage them from exploring
your web site in detail.
On the other hand, maybe your site gets
50,000 visitors a day and you think that letting people know this via
a hit counter is a good idea. Not really. If your web site gets lots of
traffic it is because you are doing something right, and having a hit
counter isn't going to affect this.
Unfortunately, what normally happens is
that the misguided Internet marketer will set up a visible hit counter
on their home page and then artificially inflate their visitor count.
This is done in the hopes that it will impress people, but it's a terribly
bad idea and does not work.
In the early days of the web it was "cool"
to have a hit counter on your home page, but they are so commonplace these
days that no one pays them any attention anyway. No matter what your reason
for using a visible hit counter, we say dump it and start tracking!
Tracking Visitors' Footsteps
While Yahoo and Infoseek don't have visible
counters on their pages, rest assured that they know your every move.
No other advertising medium allows you to do the things the Internet does,
and it amazes us that more marketers do not take advantage of serious
site tracking.
Part of the problem seems to be that many
Internet marketers are only concerned with promoting their web site and
getting more people to visit. More visitors equals more sales right? Well
yes that is true, but only if your web site leads visitors through the
sales process.
Before you even begin promoting a web site,
you should have in your mind the path that you want visitors to take through
your site. Sales is a process. One step leads to the next, until finally
the end result is hopefully that what was once just a prospect is now
a customer.
Tracking your visitor's footsteps throughout
your web site is the best way to determine why they didn't take the action
that you wanted them to take. Who knows, maybe 80% of your visitors aren't
even making it past your introductory page? You'll never know unless you
track them.
Consider this another Internet marketing
rule that is written in stone. If you're not tracking your entire web
site and tweaking it on a regular basis, you're throwing money down the
proverbial drain. From a profit standpoint, it is critical that you know
the answers to questions like:
- How do visitors find your site in the
first place?
- How many of them make it past the main
page?
- Which page of your site is the most
popular?
- How long does the average visitor stick
around?
- What is the average number of pages
viewed?
- What path do visitors take through your
site?
- What links do they use to leave your
site?
If you don't know the answers to these simple
questions, here's an easy way to increase your profits starting immediately.
And the good news is that it may not cost you anything other than some
time. We're going to show you how to use free CGI scripts to ultimately
increase sales!
While you don't really need to learn anything
technical to use the scripts we're going to suggest, you do need to be
able to run CGI scripts on your web server. If you have no idea what CGI
scripts are, ask your ISP. If they say no, we strongly suggest that you
find a new ISP.
If you haven't realized it by now, we are
a big fan of CGI scripts because they are what allows you to add interactivity
to your web site. But CGI scripts can also help you do many other things,
like track your visitors' footsteps. Let's see what we can get for free
at CGI-Resources ...
- Go to http://www.cgi-resources.com
- Click on "Programs and Scripts"
- Click on "Perl"
- Click on "Logging Accesses and Statistics"
You'll be presented with no less than 30
CGI script packages which will help you gather valuable information about
your visitors, and believe it or not, most of them are free! We looked
at all of them, so we'll save you the time and suggest the two we like
best to help you get started.
One of the first scripts we tried, and still
one of our favorites, is AXS by Fluid Dynamics. It's one of the first
scripts listed and you can't miss it. You can download it for free, and
with a minimal amount of effort you could be tracking your entire web
site within the next few hours.
The direct URL to the AXS script is http://www.xav.com/scripts/axs
-- rather than going into detail about it here, we'll let you discover
it for yourself. It's a great system and the only thing we don't like
about it is that it creates it's own log files, and they get huge if your
site is busy.
The alternative is to use something like
Darryl Burgdorf's WebLog. The direct URL to this great script is http://awsd.com/scripts/weblog
-- and it does everything AXS does, but it runs off of your existing server
logs which makes it easier to set up for most. It's also more efficient.
Both AXS and WebLog will give you all of
the information you could ever want about your visitors, and both display
this information in a way that is easy for you to interpret using graphs,
etc. We encourage you to download and set up one of these scripts to track
your web site.
My Site Is Being Tracked, What Next?
The point of tracking your site is to act
on the information you gather and use it to improve your web site's effectiveness.
If you discover that 80% of your visitors aren't making it past the first
page, or that the average person leaves within 2 minutes, you now have
your work cut out for you.
The real value of tracking your visitor's
footsteps is that it will help you determine why they did not take the
action that you wanted them to take. Once you see how most people navigate
your web site, you can then make changes until the path they take is the
one you want.
Spend some time implementing a good tracking
system on your site, because if you can increase your visitor-to-sales
ratio even just a few percentage points it will be more than worth your
time. Remember, it doesn't matter how many hits you get if your site doesn't
do its job.
|  The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet - Learn from the best. The author of this site, Corey Rudl gets over 1.8 million visitors to his websites monthly, does 6.6 million dollars in sales online each year (yes, that is $6,600,000), and personally makes hundreds of thousands of dollars from his online businesses... all from his one small office. So listen to what he has to say as he knows what he is talking about when it comes to starting and promoting a business on the Internet.
Click here to learn the most efficient and fastest way to make money on the Internet now. He reveals all his unconventional tips, tricks and techniques with examples. |
