Tracking who is hitting your website

Jon Oster of First Rate. File picture / David White

For all the money they spend building websites, many organisations treat as a matter of faith that the sites are working.

They may have tools to tell them how many visitors they get, but where did those people come from? What do they do on the site? And how much was the visit worth to the bottom line?

Those are the questions Auckland company First Rate is trying to answer with its Media Tracker software.

Having the answers has allowed customers to increase the effectiveness of their sites. Yellow Pages boosted the traffic it was getting through search engines by a third, and the Retirement Commission managed to get a 411 per cent increase in traffic to its sorted.co.nz site through more effective targeting. Technical director Jon Ostler said Media Tracker grew out of First Rate's search engine marketing consultancy.

"We knew clients were burning cash on ineffective marketing, and we wanted to make a better way to measure the performance of their campaigns and the conversion rate from any extra traffic," Ostler said.

The results from Media Tracker and similar tools resoundingly point to search engines as the most important tool for web marketing.

The challenge then becomes to optimise the site so natural search methods will put it near the top of the queue in a web search. Firms can also pay search engines for their link to come up when certain keywords are typed in.

"If people are spending money on getting their site seen, they need benchmarks to know how much they should be paying for. We are offering enterprise level reporting without an enterprise level budget," Ostler said.

Baycorp Advantage group marketing manager Ian Cooper said the credit checking and debt collection company has used Media Tracker for more than a year.

"We use it to track general behaviour on our public website, where the traffic is coming from, whether it is generated by links from other sites, from email campaigns or search engines," Cooper said.

"We can see what key words people type in to access the site, and we use that information to improve the content. We may find a lot of people are trying to access information further down the site, so we may move it to the front."

First Rate chief executive Graeme Frost said the company was expanding into Australia and further afield.

"We are eating our own dog food and using search engine advertising and optimisation to find new customers," Frost said.