Forum Moderators: DixonJones
I work for a local hardware store, the guy's been around like 10 years or so. He has a pretty good place in the local market.
Just recently he's hired me to help him break into the e-commerce world. Personally, I'm a web developer that focuses more on the development side of things, rather than the marketing strategies, but I'm always up for a challenge and some fun.
Anyhow, it's been my suggestion to give Google AdWords a shot, and the higher-ups have been a little reluctant to spending money on online advertising. (Yes, it's stupid to magically assume more people are going to visit the site without spending an extra dime -- but that's what I'm dealing with.)
Well more to the point, I've been looking for software that can basically tracker a user's progrss through our site. I want to be able to monitor where people are going, and what pages they are leaving from. This way I'll have some proof to go to management with that the only traffic we are getting is the local market.
My personal opinion is that local people are going to our site (we get decent traffic), but instead of buying online they view the prices, and then come into the store and buy the stuff.
We mainly want to target the market outside of this area.. we have daily shipping that goes out, and it's basically become my job to make that guy's job harder. ;)
Any help would be tremendous!
Michael
There are thread discussions on the best - i've personally used webtrends and surfaid to gather data on entry/exit pages, session length, click-thru paths, etc.
I'm basically looking for software to analyze them and generate a nice pretty format that I can bring to the people with the checkbook.
Any idea on what's the "best" in your opinion? I've used WebTrends Log Analyzer in the past, seemed pretty good. Anything you think may work better?
Thanks!
Michael
Webtrends, IBM Surfaid, Webalizer, Netracker, hitslink, faststats, livestats, analog...
check out [webmasterworld.com...] for a cross-section of what members use.
Put hidden tags in the HTML files and the software tracks the user?
Thanks!
Michael
you can add javascript etc to a tagging system to get more info on user behavior. Hitbox does this sort of thing to get real-time reporting.
the simplistic way is tagging a page with a 1x1 pixel image.
however, you might run into problems using the logo or something like that if you use includes.
A company called HumanClick (I think who's now LivePerson) used to use some type of Javascript tagging. You'd put a little javascript include on your page that grabbed it off their servers, and you run their software localled (which logs in and stuff). From there you can see where a person has gone, how long they've been reading a certain page, where they went next.
They've even took it as far as being able to click a button and the software will send a banner flying across the screen for the user to click on if they want some live chat.
It used to be free amongst many other things, I don't believe it is anymore.
Anyhow, just thought I'd throw that in there. I'm going to try some of these software packages many people have thrown out there.
Thanks a lot for everyone's help and cooperation!
Michael
