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Article by Sam Martin, PE, CVS, President of OfficeOnWeb, Technologies. 8/2/2000

"HOW IS IT GOING?"

The key to success on the net or other marketing and support venues is finding out how your marketing and other efforts are performing. So tell me, who's been visiting your web site lately? What? You don't know? How can you tell what works?

To find out, you must have some sort of tracking in place. Real visitor statistics, or "stats," to tell you and your helpers the types of visitors visiting your site, where they are coming from, how long they stay, entry and exit pages and much more.

You need this information to make informed decisions about how things are going and what to do to improve the effectiveness of your efforts. Did that ad you ran in the paper produce results? When people came to your site did they stay, buy, or leave, and what was popular?

By analyzing this information you learn where to try a different approach, items that may need better explanations, buying habit directions, and ways to improve your promotional strategies. An expert can look at this information and tell you about problems and other issues in a mater of minutes. For example, one of our customers, www.rockwellclub.com, came into our office with notification that one of their very nice promotional offers, a free print, had received 150 requests within the day. I think they were unsure if they should be happy that success had hit, or concerned. I instantly examined the log records, and recognized a pattern that indicated the requesting parties didn't even care about the product. They just loved free stuff. I notified the client, assisted in making a decision on how to handle it, and made the change within 15-minutes. Real loss suffered, around $500 and the wrath of people that are "free stuff junkies." Potential loss, $20,000 or more. The potential loss was stopped by the presence of logs and the ability to read them. Positive results were a significant increase in genuine added interest in the company's newsletter, added future potential sales, a lesson learned in marketing and avoidance of some unscrupulous people, and an improved promotional program.

So how do you get this valuable and sometimes critical information? There are a number of ways to collect visitation data and generate statistics for your web site. First, the data must be collected. There are many ways to do this, but the only real way to go is to make sure your "host" has a real logging system. Second, a package that generates appropriate statistics. If your hosting provider recommends page counters, a third party system, or anything but true logs, say goodbye. They cannot help you at any price. Finally, examine the logs and statistical package result. If you have trouble reading them, ask for advice. The advice of a hostmaster or Internet Marketing specialist can tell you volumes.

So. Ask where your logs are, take a look at your logs, and see how you are doing. I's the only way to fly.

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Did you know that in 1998 more than 95% of OfficeOnWeb's new customers made a profit from their web site within their first year of operation? Sad, but it is true. This compares to less than 20% industry wide ever even breaking even. Why? Professional and directed expertise. This industry average for people leaving their current web service provider is 4% per month! That's nearly 50% over a year! Ours is less than 1% per year. That is because we endeavor to make our clients money and don't just offer a "pat solution" that we know has a low probability of ever making our client a profit. Some of the features that make up the level of success that our clients enjoy are:

 Five redundant backbone connections

 99.999% up time on UNIX servers

 Redundant OC-3 connect to all five backbones

 Full data center services

RAID 5 system with weekly backup of critical systems

 True Web Developer Services

 Large support site for clients and visitors

 Four level or higherencryption on all e-commerce solutions designed by Office On Web (this is the government standard required if Government people are to use a site)

 We NEVER host a commercial site on an access server (that is really bad, but common in dial up providers)

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