Social media is an important source of revenue for traffic to websites. However, realistically there are a limited number of services available that can track with any accuracy as compared to someone randomly searching your topic or company were seeing some other form of advertisement not related to a social media website such as a commercial on television, newspaper or magazine article. With the QuickTagger service from InMotion Hosting, you can now easily modify your links with labels according to where you post them. All you have to do is categorize where you want to publicize your links, and QuickTagger will generate all the coding necessary for you automatically and count all your visitors in Google Analytics. This is an extremely useful tool if you want to make sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are engaging your desired audience. There is also a feature for someone that has a Tweetburner account that will give you your audience’s Geo-demographics, which will then better enable you to meet their needs.
Tracking Tools Based On Your Web Hosting Server
There are other services aside from QuickTagger that will also enable you to better meet the needs of your target audience; there are server-side tracking tools such as WUBAT (website user and behavior analysis tool). The main difference is server-side tracking software blindly counts activity on the server and then tries to determine what that activity means. Server-based systems that count “clicks” are usually free with service contracts, the major problem however is that these services only track. When the server detects a serious over counting or under counting problem, server-based software only count non-repetitive traffic so that you get an accurate count of real visitors to your website. Google has spiders running all the time that keep track of how relevant your website is in their ranking system and these may account for thousands of hits on your website every month.
The problem is these are not real people visiting your website, but little robots are going through your website automatically to check your standing; the spiders can thereby seriously throw off the number of accurate visitors every month. The spiders can account for 30 to 70% of visits to your website unless you filter them out. There are also problems with server-side under counting. Proxy servers are used by large corporations to make it easier for their customers or employees to download information from websites, this places numerous servers closer to the end user so that the data is buffered and does not have to be pulled multiple times from the other side of the country. So then when a customer logs on to your website, they are viewing it from a proxy server instead of your own, which then does not register the visit accurately.
Website-Based Tracking Tools vs QuickTagger
There are also website tracking tools that basically count the hits on your website, where the visitors are located, and their possible search queries that led them to your website. The downside is that the data can be skewed because of the fact that a lot of these website tracking tools count the number of hits and do not show multiple visits from the same user as a repeat customer. This can be a problem when trying to accurately count how many real visitors you have on your website every month. The data can also be skewed by where your website is placed in a ranking algorithm on a given website. Therefore, QuickTagger is the way to go when trying to accurately keep count of the traffic your website is getting because it has the best features of both types of services so all the bases are covered. Everything from social media links, to search engine queries, to organically generated hits to your website are automatically taken care of for you.
Web Hosting Help Guide: Juliana is a webmaster curating cool tools for all your web hosting needs. You can find her in Los Angeles @InMotionHosting blogging all her tracking techniques on Twitter @JulianaPayson. This article was written by a guest author. Would you like to write for us?