HitBox.com -- The Lazy Marketer's Traffic Analyzer
Web Marketing Today, Issue 64, November 10, 1999
But HitBox.com does more than count page views. They offer most (though not all) of the information you can learn from an analysis of your website's traffic logs (which we'll be discussing in the December 1, 1999 issue of Web Marketing Today). You can find information about visitor domains, countries, number of unique visitors, the URLs of referring sites, search words used in search engines to find your site, common paths through your site, operating system version, browser type and version, etc.
However, HitBox.com goes substantially beyond logfile analysis through the use of some JavaScript code on your home page. This JavaScript extracts considerable information about the configuration of your visitor's web browser, information that is valuable in determining how to design your site for your visitor's browser capabilities. Some tidbits of information include: time zone, screen resolution size, number of colors available on the monitor, JavaScript version available, whether or not the browser is enabled to execute Java applets, and Netscape plug-ins installed.
From a design standpoint, I was interested to find that less than 8% of my visitors had monitors configured 640 x 480 pixels, and only 10% were limited to 256 colors. Unfortunately, only Netscape browsers are susceptible to extracting information about plug-ins, but I was interested to find plug-in information for Live Audio (75%), Shockwave Flash (67%), Real Player (52%), QuickTime (49%), Adobe Acrobat (37%), and Shockwave (33%).
HitBox.com provides way to check visitor and page-view statistics painlessly. However, there are several drawbacks. First, a HitBox.com link on every page may distract people from the focus of your business or organization (though you can pay a monthly fee to get the information without the HitBox graphic). Second, every time your webpages require a image served from another webserver, there is the potential to slow down the speed of loading your pages. Finally, the ease of gathering HitBox data make keep you from doing full analysis of your logfiles that will provide considerably more vital marketing information. I probably will leave HitBox on my site temporarily to collect more information, but will remove it after a month or so, bringing it back every six months or so to learn new information about browser configurations.
Another source of design information for your corporate website is BuyStream.com (http://www.buystream.com/). They provide custom programming to mine specific information you need about your visitors, including the type of information HitBox provides, plus page completion rate, connection speed (T1/LAN, ISDN, 56K modem, 28K modem, etc.) whether or not visitors accept cookies, etc.
