Tracking Your Visitors
Once you've got some visitors, the chances are that you want to
know more about them. How many are there? Where are they from?
What web browser do they use? Luckily for you, there are plenty
of ways to find out.
Server Log Analysis
Most web servers keep a log of every file they send, with
information about the request they received. These request
headers contain all the information a user's web browser sends
to the server when it asks for pages, images or other files. The
information includes the user's IP address, their web browser's
name and version, and the kind of files their browser can handle.
Out of this information, the IP address is probably the most
useful. Each block of IP addresses is allocated to a certain ISP
in a certain country, meaning that you can use them to tell
roughly where people are from. There are plenty of free
databases out there that map IP address to physical location,
letting you break down your visitors by country or even, in many
cases, by state.
The other thing IP addresses do for you is let you identify how
many unique visitors you have - that is, how many actual people
saw your site as opposed to how many pages were loaded overall.
This lets you figure out things like the average number of pages
each visitor sees, or the number of times the same visitor comes
back.
You can get software that will take this information from your
server logs and turn it into easy to view tables and graphs - in
fact, most web hosts will have already installed some software
like this, if you look under the 'statistics' section in your
hosting control panel.
Cookies
IP addresses can be influenced by all sorts of things, notably
ISP proxies making a whole ISP full of visitors look like just
one. As well as crude IP address tracking to find unique
visitors, then, you might also consider using a cookie. All you
do is leave a cookie on each users' computer with a
randomly-generated ID number, and then check each visitor for
cookies to see if they've been to your site before.
If you log how many ID numbers you give out and how times each
ID number appears in return visitors' cookies, you can get a
better idea of just how many visitors there were overall, and
how many times each one came back. You should consider, however,
that many users have cookies turned off in their browser, or ask
their browser to prompt them to accept or decline each cookie
individually, so while they're generally more reliable than IPs
alone you can't depend on them completely. A mixture of the two
methods is best.
Registration
If you want to know more detailed information about your
visitors, you can ask them to register and log in to use your
website. This gives you an opportunity to collect their email
address, their exact location, and pretty much anything else you
dare to ask.
You have to understand, though, that many people will be
unwilling to associate detailed demographic information with
their identity. Also, it's difficult to get registration right:
ask for it too early and people will just leave without seeing
what you've got to offer, ask too late and they've already got
what they came for.
Surveys
As an alternative to registration, you might try including
random surveys. This is the technique favoured by most big
companies: simply pop-up some kind of message saying 'would you
be willing to participate in a survey to help us improve our
website?', and then pop up the survey questions if the visitor
says yes.
The advantage of this is that surveys can clearly state that
they're completely anonymous: you don't know the person's name,
where they live, or anything else like that. This gives you the
opportunity to ask more personal questions that you would
otherwise be able to, establishing a solid demographic and
preference profile for different parts of your audience.