What is a web tracker ( also known as a site tracker or visitor tracker
)?
A web tracker will help you track the visitors that visit your webpages.
As a webmaster you'll run into the problem of actually figuring out how your visitors
use your website, how many visitors use your website, where they come from and
how well your pages get indexed by search engines.
The basic idea behind
how a web tracker works is the simple placement of a small HTML or Javascript
code on the webpages you want to track. When your visitors reach those pages their
browser will also load the small code provided by MindViz Tracker! Our server
will then log their anonymous data such as operating system, browser, resolution,
referring url, page url, etc... and then analyze it to provide you with a very
detailed and accurate account of that visitor's visit to your website.
In
turn a tracker will help you run your business better, and with the indepth analysis
and real-time reports MindViz Tracker will allow you to make the vital steps needed
to help your business grow and move in the right direction.
Many customers
will buy into simple log analyzer tools (such as
webalizer) but they can easily be fooled by the fact
that these tools will mindlessly track each individual page request regardless of
if it was produced by a "human being" or a "computer or web crawler".
Log analyzers also have a hard time to determine how many "human beings"
are actually viewing your website on a given day, month or even year because they
can only use a visitor's IP address to determine if they are a
unique
visitor. This is extremely misleading because nowadays a significant portion
of internet visitors are behind proxy servers (AOL, MSN, Juno, Netzero, etc...).
A visitor behind a proxy server could have any number of different IP addresses
while they visit your website. This makes the statistics provided by a log analyzer
highly inaccurate and misleading.
Log analyzers are also very misleading
when considering other statistics like
page loads.
This is true because a log analzyer will not only count real human page loads
but also those provided by search engine crawlers that could easily view hundreds
to thousands of your pages in a given day. If you are interested in seeing how
crawlers crawl your website and what pages they load by all means invest in a
log analyzer, but for me and I'm sure for you, you are interested in "real
humans" that make purchases on your website or actually use and interact
on your website. These are the relevent statstics you need to help your business
grow, this is the stuff that MindViz Tracker! is made of. Log analzyers will also
give you an inaccruate account of page loads if you run a website that uses "frames".
You really only want to count for one page load but a log analyzer will count
as many page loads as you have frames.
Log analyzers can easily undercount
your statistics because nowadays most Internet Service Providers will cache your
pages locally in order to deliver them to their members faster than loading them
from your website's server again. In this case your server isn't even accessed and you
will lose that hit. Because a web tracker is a code that sits on your page it
will load no matter what server your webpage is loaded from. And because MindViz
Tracker's javascript code busts browser caching we can account for all of your
visitor traffic.
A quick overview of why a web tracker is a better option
than a log analyzer:1. Code Placement Case 1: With MindViz Tracker! you
track what pages you want by placing our code on those pages. A log analyzer will
tracker all of your server requests regardless.
2. Code Placement Case
2: If you have slow loading pages it is best for you to place the MindViz Tracker!
code near the top of your website since a visitor will only be tracked if our
code loads. A log analyzer will track everything since the log files are are updated
before the web page data even reaches the visitor.
3. Framed Websites:
Log analzyers can easily over-inflate page loads with framed websites. Because
you can select what pages to place the MindViz Tracker! code you can easily count
one page load for a framed site where a log analzyer will cound as many page loads
as their are frames.
4. Web Proxies : Internet Services like AOL and MSN
are a big problem when it comes to tracking your visitors. These visitor's IP
addresses can change on every request making it hard for a log anaylzer to determine
the true count of unique visitors actually on your website. MindViz Tracker! is
unaffected by this and will give you the most accurate account of your
unique
visitors.
5. ISP Cached Pages : Internet Services will sometimes cache
your pages meaning a visitor might not even hit your server to access the page.
This is a big problem for log analzyers because they will drastically under-count
your page loads. MindViz Tracker! is unaffected by this because our code is a
part of your page's HTML regardless if it's loaded from an ISP cache or your server.
6.
Web Crawlers : Such as google or yahoo will extremely over-count your statistics
if you are using a log analyzer because the log analzyer doesn't track just "human
beings". MindViz Tracker! will not track web bot activity.
In the
end MindViz Tracker! is the best option over a log analzyer because it will provide
you with the most accurate reports of the "real people" using your website.
Statistics you need to help your business grow.
But, the only way to experience your own web stats in real-time is to register for your
free account
