Is There Anybody There?

Now that my website is up and running, I'm very keen to monitor its effectiveness. As with all marketing, if it's not working then you should either a) Scrap it or b) Work out why and then improve it.

The first method to monitor website effectiveness is to monitor how many enquiries come from it - by phone, e-mail or post. This is easier to do for a small company as you can make sure that anyone who answers the phone asks where the person has heard about you. I do this for all enquiries and log that on my database so I will always know how I won a customer.

However, I also want to know how many people are viewing my website but not contacting me. If there are a lot of viewers but not many contacts then what can I improve on the site?

At previous companies I have used Deepmetrix (www.deepmetrix.com ) which is an excellent website stats package. However, it costs $49 a month - a lot of money for a new small business.

I've had a scout about and found a much cheaper but equally useful site - StatCounter (www.statcounter.com ). It is initially free but once you get over a certain number of visits you must upgrade and it then starts at $10 a month. I think that's a pretty reasonable fee to pay for knowing if my web efforts are working.

So how does it work? Basically you add a piece of Java code to each web page (which they provide). This code sends a message to StatCounter each time someone comes onto the site. It tells the counter how log the person is there, where they are from, what hardware they are using etc. You then go onto your part of the StatCounter site to view the results.

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