Type A: Advertising-based sites where measurement
is integral to the business. If someone visits
but the visit is not measured they may as well have
not come.
Type B: Sales and/or Marketing sites where measurement
is important (if you can't measure it you can't manage it),
but not fundemental.
Type A sites will tend to measure by very _auditable_ methods.
This basically means registration or controlling the site with a
custom CGI that tracks users around the site.
However
These techniques almost all come with a downside for a
type B site. Whatever anyone tells you, registration
must put off potential visitors. I am happy to register
with a publisher for my trade mags. Would I register before
I take a brochure from an exhibition stand?
Using CGI scripts to track movement round the site (cookies) means
that the ht references from the home page are all CGI calls.
(Correct me if I am wrong someone) but I would guess that this would
mean that the average search engine is not going deeper than your home
page. Cookies generated by Netscape are great when everyone is on
the current latest version of Netscape.
About the best way of doing this I can think of is to use the
IP address that you get on the log to identify the visitor.
The problem here is of course that IP addresses get
re-used. If the ISP caches then you may get several
visitors coming in with the same IP address at the same time.
Does this mean that results obtained in this way have no value?
I don't think so.
I have written a little program which works on the assumption
that if it doesn't see a record from a visitor in a 20 minute
interval then that visitor has gone. Other than that, an IP
address is a visit. I suggest that this will give accurate
results at periods of low usage, but will under-estimate the
results at high usage. This can be easily corrected for
by graphing hits vs measured visits and seeing where the curve
goes off the line. That gives you a correction factor.
Statistical. But good enough for management of the site I
would suggest.
I can't believe that I am the only person to figure this out.
Maybe I am missing something.
PS you can see what the results look like on a link from
my home page.
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Bob Browning Textor Webmasters Ltd
Textor Webmasters Ltd
10 Barley Mow Passage Marketing via Technology
London W4 4PH
Tel: +44 (181) 994 6477 www.textor.com/
Fax: +44 (181) 742 0010 bob@textor.com
Over 500 business newsletters: www.textor.com/cms
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