Web Site Tracking FAQA Guide to Website Statistics, Web Analytics, Site Traffic Reporting ServicesIf you own a web site or run an online business, you've probably wondered - How much traffic does my site get? Where is the traffic coming from? How do people find my site? What pages are they viewing when they get to my site? Are my paid advertising campaigns working? How many of my visitors are first-time visitors? How many are repeat visitors? A hosted web site tracking service can be used to answer these questions and gain valuable insight into the traffic to your site. Used properly, these services can be leveraged to provide critical information to web site marketers and those who run online businesses for making strategic decisions, increasing traffic, and growing the business. Hosted web site tracking services are typically activated by installing a small piece of javascript code in the pages of the web site. This code acts as a beacon - each time a visitor views a page on the site, the javascript code collects information about the visitor and sends this information back to the tracking service, where it is stored in a database. Tracking services typically provide an array of different types of reports comprised from the data collected through the tracking code. To see a sample of information that a tracking code on this page was able to pick up about you, click here. Most tracking services provide a series of 'top level' reports, with breakdowns over a selected time period which show the number of unique visitors to the site, number of page views, number of repeat visitors, number of first-time visitors, etc. Most services also provide breakdowns of traffic by ISP, geographic location, pages viewed, entry pages, exit pages, referring web site, etc. Many services also provide reports that show the search terms that visitors entered in search engines, such as Google, for visitors that found the site through search engines. Additionally, most services report on technical information about visitors, which may be useful to web designers, such as browsers and operating systems used by visitors. Some services provide detailed reporting on an individual visitor level. These types of reports will show an individual visitor's page-by-page path through the site, in conjunction with the visitor's IP address, their internet service provider, link that they clicked to get to the site (if any), date and time of last visit (if any), and more. These reports are not only useful with smaller or newer sites that attract only a few visitors, but are also useful with larger sites when one may want to examine the behavior of a certain segment of visitors (i.e. those coming from a particular advertising campaign, or those that completed an online purchase). For online businesses and 'eCommerce' web sites, some tracking services offer tools that can be used to breakdown traffic based on certain defined goals, such as completing a registration form, proceeding to a shopping cart checkout page, or finally completing a payment transaction. These services can also be used to track the performance of paid advertising campaigns (such as Google Adwords), calculating ROI from these campaigns, and can be used to pick up trends that may drive strategic decisions for growing an online business. For example, an online marketer may see from this type of report that only a small percentage of visitors from advertising campaign A ultimately make a purchase at the web site, whereas a much greater percentage of visitors from advertising campaign B make a purchase at the site. This type of insight may drive a business decision to reallocate funds from campaign A to campaign B, which is performing better - a decision that could directly impact the bottom line of the business. Many service providers offer a variety of different levels of service, across a range of price points, geared for different types of clients. Pricing typically is also tiered based on the level of traffic to the web site and the number of page views tracked. For the purpose of this guide, we breakdown the services into the following four categories.
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