Web-Site Monitoring And Understanding “The Hit Parade”

Depending on the way your web server is set up (and the browser program the viewer is using), you could find out far more than you’ve ever known about both your potential customers and your marketing material’s effectiveness.

Suppose someone visits your gleaming new Web-Site. What can their visit (and activity while they’re there) tell you? Well, you may be able to extract who they are (in suitably cryptic electronic format), what they looked at, in what order and, among other things, for how long.

So, what use is all this monitoring? Ever wonder if your client’s brochures are being read from cover to cover? Which benefits and offers get the most attention from a reader? Well, now you can find out. Plus, the possibility for testing different arrangements of product information etc. are endless. Swap a few hyper-links around and you can have a completely different-feeling site in a matter of minutes. The possibilities for disaster are, of course, equally amazing.

What was all that about a “hit parade”? Well, some monitoring (and quite frequently, page-rating) is expressed in terms of the number of “hits” or modem accesses a site receives in a given period. Sounds like a good way of judging interest and popularity, doesn’t it? It does until you realise that every “hit” that’s counted could represent the fact that your site is overloaded with bitsy little graphics, each graphic requiring a separate “hit” to view (or just that your potential customer has a really lousy link to the Internet).

Aaaarrrggghhh! It’s the sort of statistical minefield that makes mass-media’s TARPS and CUMES look like rock-solid reliable audience ratings by comparison. No big deal, though, it just means you’ll have to develop a healthy scepticism about web-site “hit” figures. After all, when was the last time you took a magazine’s own readership estimates at face value? The rule of thumb is the suitably American (as just about all Internet expressions seem to be): “Just ‘cause it’s a hit, that don’t make it a home run....”

Next: Sometimes You Should Just Say No

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