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A client-side Website tracking solution
can give you a comprehensive view of how users interact with
your Website. Being able to analyze your Website traffic is
critical to growing your business online.
With Tnet Atlanta’s Website Tracking Solution,
You Can:
Discover what items users are downloading, the pages they
visit most, and the pages with the highest abandon rate.
Identify which parts of your site need to be improved to
convert more traffic into customers.
Real-time activity reports display where your users are
coming from – whether it’s from a search engine
or ThomasNet’s network of industrial search sites.
Track the path users take within your site, which page they
enter on, which pages they visit, and how long they stay.
Find out which search terms are getting you the most qualified
traffic by viewing the top 150 keywords and phrases that
users search to get to your Website.
Start tracking your Website in just a few days. A few lines
of JavaScript code can easily be added to each page of your
Website by your Web developer, or with our assistance.Our
client-side Web tracking solution from ThomasNet.com, powered
by Thomas Register® and Thomas Regional®, helps ensure that
your company is making the most out of its Internet marketing
resources. Armed with the detailed information your report
provides, you’ll be able to gauge the effectiveness
of your Internet marketing initiatives.
For more information about keeping track
of your Website visitors, contact your local ThomasNet.com
representative or call 770-951-0147 x 10.
If you want to know what’s happening
on your Website, client-side tracking provides a level of
control to your efforts by keeping tabs on your otherwise
invisible customers. With client-side tracking, a few lines
of JavaScript code are added to each page of your Website.
When new users come to your site, this code is downloaded
to their computers. By “tagging” your visitors
in this way, client-side tracking solutions monitor the user’s
paths through your Website. You’ll learn where they
came from, what they did during their sessions on your site,
and when they left. When you analyze this Website traffic
data, you’ll be able to determine what on your site
is working and what isn’t, so you can fix the bad and
improve upon the good. For example:
- You can identify and fix the pages that have high abandon
rates.
- You can learn that a lot of people are abandoning your
registration form at a particular step, and adjust the form
accordingly.
- You can add more CAD drawings if you discover a strong
correlation between people downloading your drawings and
buying your products.
The true beauty of client-side tracking
is its capacity to measure real customer behavior. You’ll
be getting good data, and good data is what’s behind
all good business decisions.
In today’s industrial marketplace,
your Website is no longer just a sales tool. It’s a
survival tool. As early as 2002, B2B Magazine reported that
90% of buyers and specifiers first turn to the Web when sourcing
companies, products, and services. In this environment, where
buyers and specifiers enjoy access to a virtual smorgasbord
of suppliers and product information, your customers and prospects
are increasingly becoming invisible to you. They’re
on the Internet, comparing you to your competitors and moving
anonymously through the buying process. Whether or not a prospect
chooses to buy from you is entirely up to your Website –
its content, its ease of use, and its capacity to help visitors
find exactly what they need.
Where does that leave you? Completely in
the dark…unless you can find out how customers and prospects
are getting to your Website, and follow their footsteps through
your site.
Cutting-edge Website tracking technologies
make it possible to indirectly connect you with the people
who visit your Website, so you can determine whether your
Website is effectively converting these visitors into customers.
With the right Web tracking solution, you can obtain rich
data on how many visitors come to your site, where they come
from, the duration of their visits, your most popular pages
or products, and other details that will help you craft a
better site. Even more important, you can discover which of
your pages have high abandon rates and how many users hit
the Back Button the instant they land at your home page. This
is vital information in today’s Internet-centric business
climate.
Herein lies the true benefit of a Website
tracking solution. Using the valuable data it provides, you
can zero in on the areas of your Website that need improvement,
initiate upgrades that will enhance the user experience and,
in the end, convert more visitors into customers.
Website tracking data also helps you correlate
your marketing activities with the behavior of your online
buyers. By analyzing data that reveals where your visitors
are coming from and what they’re doing when they arrive
at your site, you can better determine which of your Internet
marketing initiatives are driving the most qualified traffic
to your Website. But you need to tread carefully, because
the Website tracking landscape is a minefield of hit-and-miss
products and approaches.
- How
many users come to your site by clicking on search engine
or directory listings, links from other sites, and so on.
- Which
specific pages these visitors are looking at, and how many
times they look.
- What
they do while they’re on your site. How deep down
they dig. How long they spend on each page. What they
download and what they buy.
With the wrong Website tracking software,
on the other hand, you’re apt to spend a lot of money
obtaining data that offers little value and even less significance.
To make sure you get the right software, it’s important
you understand the fundamental differences between server-side
tracking and client-side tracking.
-
draws inferences about Website activity based on the server’s
activity.
-
analyzes Web users’ activity directly on a particular
Website – a significant distinction, as you will see.
First, though, it’s helpful to become
familiar with the terminology of tracking. Whenever a Web
user visits a site, two noteworthy items of hardware come
into play. A “server”, which stores, or “hosts”,
the many files that make up the Website. A “client”
which, in this context, is a desktop or laptop computer running
a Web browser.
When the user enters the site’s URL
into the Web browser or clicks a link within the site, the
client sends a request to the site’s server, which “serves”
the files for the requested Web page to the user’s browser.
Every time the Web server receives a request for a file, it
records, or “logs,” a hit.
Server-side tracking tools create records,
called “log files,” of hits on a server and attempts
to reverse-engineer this superficial data into something meaningful.
But the results can be unreliable, as server-side tracking
simply can’t measure real user behavior.
No doubt you’re familiar with the
term “hits.” Hits look fantastic on paper, but
as far as statistical significance goes, their value is limited.
Remember: a server logs a hit every time it serves up a file;
but any single page of a Website comprises multiple files
(including graphics files) – anywhere from half a dozen
to over 100. Contrary to the prevalent misconception, “one
hit” doesn’t equal “one visitor.”
This means that if you’re counting your Website hits
as visitors, you could be significantly over-counting the
number of visitors your Website is getting. And while this
may boost company morale, it won’t do much to help your
business grow.
To compound the shortfalls inherent in server-side
tracking reports, computer technology throws cache files and
proxy servers into the mix. When a user visits a page on your
Website, the page files are stored in a “cache folder”
on the user’s hard drive. If the user later returns
to that page, the browser – to save time – will
fetch the cached files instead of making a much longer trip
to the Web server. This can result in under-counting your
Website traffic. Even if your server-side tracking software
is monitoring page views and user sessions, it may be under-counting
that data because server-side tracking software has no way
to tell when a visitor views cached pages of your Website.
Another reason server-side tracking software
under-counts Website traffic is something called a proxy server
– a machine that stores various Websites in order to
heighten the efficiency of the Internet. As an example: to
accelerate page downloads for its customers, AOL downloads
Websites like yours to proxy servers, of which it has hundreds
scattered across the country. When AOL users connect to the
Internet and pull up your site, they’re actually accessing
it from an AOL proxy server. Yet server-side tracking software
accounts for only the initial download of your
site to the proxy server. After that, anyone who accesses
your site via a proxy server remains beneath the tracking
software’s radar, and the under-counting effect becomes
amplified.
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