[thelist] Basic Traffic tracking question

sales at iibiz.com sales at iibiz.com
Wed May 2 11:31:33 CDT 2001


>First question, is this an IP address,

Yes - but only mildly valuable.  If it's someone from a large company
visiting who has their own server and static IP address, you can actually
key http://234.344.44.22 into your browser and you will get their web site.

But since the "bulk" of people hitting your site are going to be signing on
thru general ISP's, it assigns them a different IP address every time they
sign on.  Sometimes if you look at some of the other lines of the report you
can see that is was AOL, but nothing real definite.

>how is it valuable?  My understanding is that they tell us *something*
about who our
> user is (or perhaps, where they are coming from?)

The only way I really use them is to track that particular user's path thru
the site.  As far as location, I assume you mean geographic - as mentioned
above anyone signing on thru AOL would show as coming from, say North
Carolina or where ever their servers are.  Which would be horribly
inaccurate information to be giving your marketing department.  Those people
could be coming from anywhere, but signing THRU AOL, or whatever.


> The next question will be, can Webtrends display these numbers as
something more useful than a
> number

No. There are valid reasons for this.  Privacy laws do exist AND everyone
would have to have a static IP address that they're signing on thru, which
isn't going to happen.  Unfortunately AOL, MSN and all the others aren't
going to go away.


 > what that number is and what it represents?

Unless you have an issue on a Federal level, you aren't going to be able to
do much with those numbers.  Trust me.  Had a problem with a visitor, and
could not get ANY information on them from the ISP at all even though there
was a potential lawsuit in consideration.

Hope this helps.  In my opinion, traffic reports are great for seeing what
pages are hit, which are your busiest days, times of day, etc., but it can
quickly become a case of spending WAY more time than it's worth trying to
analyze some of the other data that they provide.

Best of luck with your boss!

Sandy







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