IndexTools - Online Visitor Tracking

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Although many people are happy to have just a visitor counter on their website, to indicate the volume of traffic which comes their way, this information can often be misleading, as many visitor counters do not provide any access to daily statistics, or how many of those visitors have never been to your site before.  The website statistics provided by your website hosting provider can be useful to see the top search items, most pages visited and broken links, but in many cases the information is limited and only provides numeric IP addresses.  Ideally, if you want to ensure that your website is reaching the correct target audience, you need a more complex visitor monitor which can provide background details such as a which pages an individual visitor looks at on your website, the internet connection used (for example the IP address once converted to text can identify the company a visitor works for), how long they spend on each page and much more.  IndexTools promises to do this - we review how well it achieves its aims.

IndexTools is a very innovative visitor tracking program which uses a small amount of javascript added to each web page which you wish to track, in order to keep tabs on every visitor to your website.  Once you apply to their program and add the javascript to your web-pages, IndexTools collates data about every visitor to your website, noting whether they have been to your website before, and tracking each page on your website which that person visits, together with a note of the time that they spend on your website.  Even if the visitor has cookies and javascript disabled, IndexTools is still able to note that they visited your website, although you cannot track their movements through the site.

IndexTools allows you to judge how effective marketing campaigns are, as for each visitor, the program tracks whether they have directly accessed your website or come from another page, such as a site which lists a link to your own website, or a search engine.  If the visitor has come from a search engine, the details of the search string which had been entered by the visitor are also stored, for later analysis by yourself.  You can also further reduce errors, by blocking certain IP addresses, such as your own internet connection and that of any body else that maintains the site (or search engine robots).

If you subscribe to either the Premium or eBusiness edition of the program, a note is also kept of any files which are downloaded from your website, and also which exit links a visitor clicks on to leave your website, which can therefore be useful to analyse the effectiveness of any affiliate programs to which you subscribe.    The eBusiness edition, even allows you to add your own user-defined actions which can be tracked by the Javascript.

You are even able to set up campaign tracking parameters, to allow you to amass information on any advertising campaigns which you may use to promote your website.  This is easy to set up and allows you to specify a name for each campaign and assign them to different reporting categories.  You then merely need to add details of either a specific page which your campaign is designed to attract visitors to, or the name of a referring URL from where your visitors will come if attracted by your advertising.

All of the information collated by IndexTools can later be analysed by authorised users, and can be sorted according to daily, weekly, monthly or annual statistics (or a custom period).  Pages visited can be displayed by reference to their HTML title, or by the web page address.

All of this information can be very useful to see the effects of your marketing campaigns and what attracts users to your website.  We ourselves have used the information to hone the keywords used for each of our web-pages as well as re-wording some of the web-pages to make some information that is regularly searched for, easier to find and at the same time, altering some of the text to try and deter people from looking at the wrong web-page for certain information.

There are three versions of the program available, to which you can easily subscribe on-line.  The standard Professional edition, caters for 20,000 page views per month, provides visitor tracking, allows you to set up several users who are able to access the account and exclude your own visits.  The Premium edition, caters for 50,000 page views per month and adds the ability to send automatic scheduled reports by email.  You can also have 3 websites under the one account, track downloads and exit links, SSL tracking (for secure areas of a website) and even trend analysis.  Finally, the eBusiness edition, is the same as the Premium edition, but allows you to track user-defined actions and perform conversion ratio analysis.

IndexTools (Professional edition) is available for a free trial period of 15 days, and after that costs range from $9.95pm (or $99.95pa) for the Professional edition, $24.95pm ($249.95) for the Premium edition and up to £49.95pm ($499.95pa) for the eBusiness edition.  With the possibilities available to hone your website to make visitors stay on your website for longer, and the ability to add more than one website to each account (without any further charges), we feel that this price is easily justified, particularly with a guaranteed 30 day money back guarantee.

We would however, have liked to have seen the Premium edition available for free trial in order that you can test out all of the extra features before you decide whether to subscribe, particularly as the reports do not indicate which functions are not available (such as exit link tracking).  Alas this has now been superseded by Google's statistics, which provide much of the same functionality but for free.