On-line Monitoring

The monitoring of on-line activity is the key to successful deployment of an on-line marketing strategy.  Without knowledge of the effectiveness of on-line promotion, time and money is wasted.

Fortunately, the Internet allows much more to be learnt about your potential customers' reaction to your efforts than is possible via conventional means - and without the use of intrusive questionnaires etc. 

Web site logs and derived statistics.  Unfortunately, there is a great deal of mis-information disseminated as to what is or is not possible to monitor on line. It is often said for example, that you can know exactly who has visited your web site and which pages they have seen etc.  Not true (at least that is, without embedded 'cookies' etc that are often 'firewalled-out').  The reality is that you can see which pages have been visited and which computers have visited the Web site and from which countries, but, linking all three factors is not usually possible.  That said, a good deal can be inferred by close inspection of the data.

Effective monitoring, in any case, needs a number of factors to be correct.  For example, monitoring on-line activity in a Web site requires that:

• The full Web site logs are available to the Web site owner for his own analysis if required

• The Web site host is capable of analyzing the logs and providing up-to-date look-up tables of numerical domains that are capable of resolving the domains to produce meaningful Web site statistics.

• The software driving the log analysis must produce meaningful and detailed statistics - not just 'executive' graphs.

• Analysis of the statistics is undertaken frequently to identify trends and anomalies

• A trained and experienced individual interprets the statistics to provide marketing-related feed-back.

There are of course many other ways that visitors to Web sites can be monitored.  All have constraints however and most can have a negative impact in a B2B environment, for example:- 

Guest books can provide useful information - but not usually unless they 'protect' Web-based information of value - i.e where the value is obvious and the reader is 'compelled' to fill in the data.  If the value is not obvious, they will serve as barriers to entry to part of a Web site.  If used as a forced gateway for a whole Web site, the web site will become effectively invisible.

Cookies have done a wonderful job in assisting the average Web user to have his settings remembered by the page he is visiting - and in providing information to the Web owner.  However, as the Internet has developed, the proliferation of 'pop-ups' and similar undesirable elements has driven most business users to install firewalls - and most of these will be set up to bar cookies from unknown sources.  

Last modified: April 29, 2005