Editor’s note: Russ McGuire is the online director of Business Reform Magazine. Each issue of Business Reform features practical advice on operating successfully in business while glorifying God.
Matt P sent me a note following last week’s column. He asks “I’m wondering why all the hyperlinks in this article are routed through your domain first… What gives??? Are you tracking??? Are you a wolf in sheep’s clothing???”
As you may recall, last week’s column largely focused on spyware – software that tracks your Internet activities, often so that the spying company can use that information for marketing purposes. Before receiving Matt’s note, I hadn’t really thought about his valid concern that my way of providing you with links to valuable resources might actually force my weekly column into the spyware category, but now that he’s brought it out in the open, I guess it’s time to confess.
I do track how many times people click on the links in my articles. The ability to monitor activity is one of the great capabilities of the web. Anyone that’s running a website and doesn’t keep track of the number of “hits” they are receiving and which parts of their site are most popular and least popular is missing a great opportunity and likely failing to effectively serve their customers/visitors. By tracking which features or items are most popular on my website, I can make adjustments to provide more of what people like and try to fix the things that people seem not to like.
That’s exactly what I’m doing with the links in my articles. Although virtually all web server software can track information about the visitor (e.g. their Internet address, which browser they’re using, what operating system they’re running), I throw away all that information and just count the number of clicks on each article. This allows me to know which items you, my audience, are interested in and which you aren’t. To satisfy your curiosity, at the bottom of today’s column, I’ve listed every link that I’ve included in my columns along with how popular each item has been.
If you have a website and you aren’t tracking the hits, maybe you should. Check with your web hosting provider and see if they already have a reporting tool integrated into their service. Our hosting provider, ProHosting, has integrated the WebLog tool into their service. WebLog is one of several helpful tools provided for free by Darryl Burgdorf at his WebScripts site. If your hosting provider doesn’t already have a tool built in, WebLog may be a good solution for you.
WebLog does an excellent job for us giving us daily and monthly traffic trends, day of week and hour of day trends, as well as telling us which web files on our site are most popular and which other sites most often refer folks to visit our site. However, since much of our site is dynamically created from database information, we have also developed software to track and report accesses to specific articles, newsletters, magazine issues, advertisements, and yes, links referenced in my BizNetDaily articles. As a statistics junkie, this information feeds my desire to fine tune our site to best meet the needs of our customers, and fine tune my articles to best meet the needs of my readers.
So, I hope you’ll forgive me for “spying” on you – at least to the extent of tracking which of the items I’m telling you about are of most interest to you as a group. I honestly am only using that information to better serve your interests.
If you’re like me – hungry for information, you might want to visit the “What’s Hot” page at Best of the Christian Web. This Yahoo-like web index tracks which sites are clicked on by their visitors and this page lists the sites that fall into the top 1%. Today, that represents the 34 most popular web sites in their index, although I imagine that number and the specific sites likely change frequently.
Drumroll please… And now, for your analyzing pleasure, may I introduce the ranking of all resources I’ve referenced in previous columns:
- Doom Funnel Chasers (BigIdea) 17%
- OpenOffice (OpenOffice) 13%
- Crosswalk (Crosswalk) 9%
- The Sword Project (Crosswire Society) 8%
- Alexa Toolbar (Alexa) 8%
- Avant Browser (Avant) 5%
- Mailblocks (Mailblocks) 5%
- Gamebox (Syntact) 4%
- Mozilla (Mozilla) 4%
- Daily Manna from the Net (International Bible Society) 4%
- ZipMath Demo (ZipMath) 3%
- Olive Tree Bible Software (Olive Tree) 3%
- Heartlight Desktop (Heartlight) 3%
- Mailwasher (Mailwasher) 3%
- IP Centrex (GoBeam) 2%
- Laridian Bible Software (Laridian) 2%
- IP Centrex (Vonage) 2%
- GAIM (GAIM) 2%
- Cell Phone Devotionals (Mighty Works) 1%
- Small Business Plan (T-Mobile) 1%
- Alexa Privacy Policy (Alexa) 0%
Keep the clicks and notes coming. I’m anxious to watch and hear what is of most interest to you!
Russ McGuire is Online Director for Business Reform. Prior to joining Business
Reform, Mr. McGuire spent over twenty years in technology industries, performing various roles from writing mission critical software for the nuclear power and defense industries to developing core business strategies in the telecom industry. Mr. McGuire is currently focused on helping businesspeople apply God’s eternal truths to their real-world business challenges through Business Reform’s online services. He can be reached at [email protected].
