[thelist] Basic Traffic tracking question

[Martin]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Green, Janet wrote on 2/5/01 6:26 pm

>Our organization has a huge marketing
>effort to bring ex-patrioted Iowans back to Greater Des Moines, so we
>thought it would be helpful to know where the bulk of our visitors were
>coming from so we could target those cities with "return to Des Moines"
>marketing messages. Sounds like it is not really possible to track those
>cities, with Webtrends or anything else, because the server does not collect
>the data we need. 

At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious which you may have already
thought about and rejected... why not just ask them?

You needn't ask them outright, you could ask things like their favourite
local bar ("Nominate your local bar for an award - you'll need to specify
their address")

If you're talking to data architects, they'll hit you with the phrase 
"Data
Quality Exercise" about this. Explicit data is usually more reliable than
implicit data, but is often harder to capture. And what do you do when 
they
conflict?

cheers
Martin

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGPfreeware 7.0.3 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com>
Comment: Content after the signature block is *not* signed

iQA/AwUBOvCTdnHoHnCoNczLEQI1qQCfbjs8mBE6XHIRtNdxBb/7YzkFoPsAnR1I
+fUE0PjJrZPLa81Q1WXSnFst
=41Ef
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


-------------------------------------------------------------------
email: martin at easyweb.co.uk             PGP ID: 0xA835CCCB
       martin at members.evolt.org      snailmail: 30 Shandon Place
  tel: +44 (0)778 068 6418                      Edinburgh,
  url: http://www.easyweb.co.uk                 Scotland