For most of us involved with web building or e-commerce, hit counting is
old news. We all have our hit counters so we have an idea what traffic is
like at our site on a day to day basis.Some even go as far as to note times
and chart responses to promotions. But as our on-line world evolves, so
must we.

A new breed of free counters and trackers are making a big splash and for
good reason. These counters offer an expanded variety of tracking and
counting features that some of your older counters may not. If you look on
our front page at http://www.imr-central.com , you can see that we use
Aaddzz.com ( at http://www.aaddzz.com/) for our tracking purposes. While
Aaddzz is just one of many, they do offer very extensive counting and
tracking statistics, and it's all free. Included in the features are
hourly, daily, weekly and monthly counting, browser identification (do most
of our visitors use Netscape or I.E.?), time zone statistics, geographical
identification and more.Webstat.com is another company offering similar
free services as is Hitbox.com.

Another way to track your visitors is through your advertising. We always
recommend targeted advertising, and certain types allow you to track who is
visiting you, and more importantly, why. For example, GoTo.com sells
keywords to websites, also known as keyword sponsorship. The idea here is
that when people run a keyword search (i.e. flowers), you pay "x" amount
for your
flower site to come up in that search. With your GoTo account management
center, you can see exactly which keywords are bringing in the most
visitors and conversely, which aren't. Of course, this is useful in
choosing your keywords at GoTo, but also helpful on a larger scale. These
words may provide insight as to what really brings people to your site,
therefore helping you narrow your focus to enhancing what is working and
either improving or eliminating what isn't.

Another often overlooked method of tracking is visitor communication. There
are a variety of ways to achieve this goal. One effective method is by the
installation of visitor-feedback scripts at your site. You can find a
variety of free resources of this kind. ( For starters, check The
Javascript Source at: http://javascript.internet.com/ ) Also, don't forget
that visitor feedback is not just important as people surf your page, but
when they use it as well. For example, if you sell a product, a simple
feedback form at the end of the checkout process can provide insight as to
the effectiveness of your checkout system. (i.e. Is it confusing? Is it a
detriment to the purchase?)

Finally, good old fashioned e-mail can be a great tracking tool as well.
When someone corresponds with you through your site or business, take the
time to ask them a very quick question. For
example, from time to time when we welcome a new subscriber to our e-zine,
we often write a personal thank you back, and just ask them how they found
out about us. Sometimes we'll even ask what feature about our e-zine was
of interest to them. Of course, you can't abuse this practice as you could
end up annoying visitors/clients.... not good. But if you are brief and
genuine with people, my experience is that they are usually more than
willing to help and often even like getting involved. People generally like
to have their opinions heard, especially if they think it may make a
difference... and in a properly run business,
it will.

Tracking is more than numbers and geography. It is about knowing your
current user-base and using those facts and figures to grow and expand that
base . As webspace and e-commerce competition intensifies, in-depth
tracking is another handy tool you may want to consider to keep yourself
ahead of the pack.

About the Author
Bryan Marye is the publisher of the I_M_R Resourceletter. If you would like
to receive articles like this every week from Bryan and other writers,
subscribe for free today:
mailto:subscribe@imr-central.com
or..for this and other great promotion tools, visit our home page:
http://www.imr-central.com