The Ultimate, All-in-one Tracking System

A bluesky wishlist

[sugarkane]

Back in the good old days, tracking largely consisted of analysing server logs to arrive at figures for pageviews, uniques, referrers etc. If thought was even given to arriving at ROI figures, it tended to be mainly in the vein of extrapolating increased traffic to increased revenue - more traffic == more money.

Then came along PPC, PFI etc - we had to actually spend money for traffic, and it became necessary to find out if that money was being effectively spent - server logs just couldn't cut it in that situation.

So we moved on to specialist tools for tracking PPC effectiveness, cookie-based systems for better tracking of user behaviour, systems for evaluating results of newsletters, maybe some kind of tool for keeping track of spiders, all backed up with traditional logs for the bread and butter referral etc data.

Add to that the possibility of running an affiliate program for your site, with a number of affiliates providing traffic of varying value, and effective tracking of ROI from all these traffic sources becomes slightly complicated.

It seems to me there's scope for an all-in-one tool to keep track of the cost and return of ALL traffic from whatever source, while still providing the basic traditional stats. What would you like to see in such a package?

(note: "Try XYZ package, it does everything!" is not the desired response :) )

[dmorison]

Does what you have in mind come as a tool that you own and operate, working off log files, or as a hosted solution where a service provider serves webbugs to your pages and allow you to peruse reports and what-not from their website?

[sugarkane]

Preferably as an owned tool - I'm not keen on giving away my valuable data to third parties.

But this is just a 'perfect application' exercise, it's all up for grabs!