How To Get Information About Website Visitors?
In the electronic environment, people leave more traces than offline. For example, we can find out about a site visitor not only when he came in and what pages he viewed, but also where he got to you from, if through a search engine, what he was looking for, and also in some cases, from which organization he was. Such “tracking” allows you to find out what a particular person or organization is looking for at a particular moment (what product or service). The response action of the “pathfinder” can be a call, a letter, etc.
How to get such data?
Consider the technical possibilities for obtaining information about what is currently of interest to a particular person or company.
Search Engine Optimization
The website of a company that wants to engage in response marketing is displayed in a leading position in search engines. The server on which the site is located keeps a log (log file) of visits, which records the search phrase (what), by which the site was found through a search engine, the IP address of the visitor (in some cases, an organization can be determined by the IP address) (who), as well as the time of visit (when).
Industry Portal
You can find out not only how visitors got to you, but also what they were looking for inside the site. To use the site search function, a visitor can be asked to register, which will allow you to get more information about him without resorting to IP address recognition.
Here it is important that the search on the site is in demand, that is, it helps the visitor to find really important information and is easy to use.
Specialized search service
This is a search engine that indexes a limited number of sites. This list may include sites of specific subjects, selected by the administrator of the search engine or by the user himself. By analogy with the previous paragraph, the search engine administrator can see user requests (what, who, when).
Toolbar
Essentially it is a tool to track user activity on website in the form of an additional panel for the Internet browser, which, in particular, allows you to search without loading the search engine page. For the “tracker,” ToolBar has a number of serious advantages.
First, no matter what site the user (who) clicks on in the search results, the owner of the ToolBar will still receive information about the request (what and when).
Secondly, when distributing the ToolBar, it is possible to find out the name, and email address of the user, and any other information that he agrees to leave. From the email address, in some cases, you can find out the name of the organization.
Thirdly, legal issues, in this case, are solved quite easily: in the license agreement for using the ToolBar.
Fourthly, the website of the ToolBar owner can flexibly personalize the content (show certain blocks of advertising or textual information depending on the identified interests of the visitor).
In general, the technology of personalizing content for a specific user with specific interests is called behavioral targeting and is now used mainly to display banners.
Internet statistics service
Site owners place a button on their pages, which is stored on the server of the counter. Each page opening is associated with a button unloading, which in turn is recorded on the counter server. The counter administrator can view information about visitors to client sites (what, who, when). This approach enables you to record website visitor behavior to a great degree.
Hosting
The hosting administrator can have the same access to the browsing history as the client site administrator.
Contextual advertising
This is the fastest, but also the most expensive way per user. When you go to the site through an ad, the search phrase is also visible, as is the case with conventional search engines.
