26 replies to this topic

[projectphp]

I was referring to Any practise of tracking individuals. If you track generic information, and this is not tracked to an individual, then things will be OK. What isn't allowed, as far as I am aware, is to track people individually for any purpose without their expressed consent. Plus, if you have a privacy policy, it needs to be clearly stated.

Giving users what they want is fine, as long as they opt in, not if they have to opt out. Thus, tracking generic information such as what keywords they used, generic statistics such as user habits etc is OK. Tracking this to individual users is not allowed, and even if it is, is not right IMHO. Why do you need this information, and what are you using it for?

Either way, you need to state clearly what you use such information for in your privacy policy.

Here is Yahoo's privacy privacy policy, which reads pretty evilly to me. Still, it is there if you want to read it. In general though, I would be extremely cautious about tracking anything to a specific individual UNLESS they opt-in, either by buying something or registerring in some way.

[bwelford]

I think what php was referring to was the practice of looking up IP's of visitors to the site and then contacting the company simply based on their presence on the website, rather than waiting for them to fill out a info form or ask to be contacted.

If you do ever contact someone who has visited the website, you will most often get a most negative reaction if you refer to their visit.

If you don't refer to their visit, then they may assume it's just a happy coincidence and you may get a receptive ear.

Of course, it's usually very tough to figure out who exactly visited your website from the IP.

Barry Welford

[falcon]

Hi.

I am relatively new to SEO. My company's previous web consultant used Sawmill and WPG to generate our reports.

We are still using Sawmill to analyze our web log reports and used a demo of WPG to gather ranking information on our many key phrases for a time. I've read in this forum that it really isn't necessary to monitor rankings, but I feel that I should report on this, if only for consistency's sake. Part of the reason I stopped using WPG was because I read that it was against Google's terms.

For those of you who do report on rankings, what do you use to not only gather Google rankings, but rankings for other major players, as well?

Thanks.

[Matt B]

Falcon -

Welcome to the forum!

I find my usage of WPG declining, in fact checking rankings overall, i find on the decline. The other engines say they don't like automated rankings queries, but they haven't banned anyone . . . Typically, for Google, i'll check the position manually for a "real" report of where i stand, rather than use software.

If you want my opinion on Sawmill, I liked the reporting of the log-term trends and visual stats, however, i thought the detail reports were lacking in a lot of areas. If you don't want my opinion, just ignore me.

[falcon]

Thanks for the welcome and reply, Matt B.

Perhaps I'll try spot checking some of the key phrases manually for my next report to management.

[mopacfan]

If you have access the logs, check out SawMill at www.flowerfire.com. If not, check out Indextools (www.indextools.com). We're using indextools to get around the servers that may cache our pages and thus not having any way of tracking the hits. Best of all, it's very inexpensive, but very powerful.

[awall19]

I have a question as far as tracking past the web site. Many sites use shopping carts which are hosted third party. What do you use to track the activity on those, or is that required to be part of the shopping cart?

Is there any easy way to check the common ones like PayPal...

[bdi_research]

Have you checked out Sawmill? Our company is just beginning to play with it. It can track quite a bit of information - including how your visitors click through your site if I'm not mistaken. And best of all, it is free if you agree to evaluate it.

-BDI

[Matt B]

I would also recommend downloading the trial of NetTracker. I really like the level of detail and tracking available through the interface, which is fairly simple. What impressed me was the active interface which allowed me to drill down to individual IP's, sessions and page requests.

[SEO-Richard]

This will be way off-beam for what you're looking for - probably - but I love Advance Logger at http://www.perlonline.com/advlogger/


Dirt cheap, ideal for a small or medium site wanting to drill down to pages visited by individuals, OS info, lots and lots of stuff. I bleieve you can download the logs in the latest version and export to Excel

Gives good all round info, well-presented, but would take up too much HD space on a server for a large site.

[don1]

I haved used Urchin for years and could not live without it. Clean, easy-to-use and provides information from keywords, hourly logs, to where visitors entered, exited, what browser was used etc. Fits your budget also.

[prophecy]

I have a question as far as tracking past the web site. Many sites use shopping carts which are hosted third party. What do you use to track the activity on those, or is that required to be part of the shopping cart?

Is there any easy way to check the common ones like PayPal...

We've got several yahoo store sites running Ecommstats with a little javascript wizardry. I'm sure the same thing could be done for most third party stores such as Paypal.