HitBox Tracks Your Site Traffic--Free

This service tells you who visits, how often, and where they're from.

Paul Heltzel, special to PC World

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The whole point of having a Web site is to attract visitors. Okay, building a nice site does have its own satisfactions, but you want your toil, sweat, and coding to pay off in loads of traffic. To maximize traffic, however, you need to know more than just how many people are stopping by. Whether you have a commercial or personal site, you'd probably like to know how often visitors return, where they come from, and what kind of browser they're using. No simple hit counter can give you that.

Enter WebSide Story's free HitBox.com service. In exchange for placing a HitBox link icon on your home page, you'll get comprehensive traffic reports for your site. You'll also get to know quite a bit about the people that you draw--information you can use to serve your audience better. For example, how valuable would it be for you to get immediate feedback on what impact a design tweak has on your traffic?

The HitBox service tracks visitors to your site in a variety of ways: It not only tells you how many hits you're getting, it also tells where users are coming from, what browser they're using, and how often they stop by. It then compiles this information--in real time--into various, easy-to-read reports. Your only cost is a plug for HitBox--something big commercial sites might not want to do, but that most small operators may consider insignificant compared to the benefits of the service.

Get to Know Your Visitors

I spent an afternoon with HitBox, finding out how effective my personal site is at attracting visitors. First, I registered at the HitBox site, entering some general information about my own site and was approved almost immediately. Then I cut and pasted into my home page some HTML code that links to the tracking programs on the HitBox servers. To complete the setup, I had to insert a second piece of code that displays the HitBox link button. HitBox reciprocates by providing a link to my site and ranking it among other HitBox subscriber sites based on visitor traffic. The most visited pages in a given category--say, Travel or Entertainment--move to the top of the list at HitBox.com.

After setting up, I was ready to view my stats on a series of Web pages at HitBox. I also installed the free HitBox Windows Viewer, a worthwhile 2.83MB download that offers a Microsoft Outlook-style interface for viewing the real-time stats.

First I found out how many individual users hit my site during the previous day. I also discovered which browsers these visitors used and the resolution of their monitors--helpful for sizing pages when designing. I could also tell whether they were directed to my site by search engines. HitBox even tracked the keywords visitors used to find my site. I was happy to see that more than half of my visitors came directly from a bookmark (repeat customers!). All these reports are updated instantly as more people visit the site.

Privacy Concerns

Those concerned about privacy when surfing HitBox-linked sites should be reassured that HitBox can't compile personal information about individual surfers. The service identifies each hit as an IP address and can track where each surfer was just before accessing a HitBox site. But HitBox can't identify you by name, address, or phone number. And it can't read the contents of your hard drive.

Privacy issues are also addressed for HitBox subscribers. The service gives you various options for making your site traffic information available to others on the HitBox site: You can choose to make all of your site traffic data public, to display only some parts of it (such as raw traffic numbers), or to make all of it confidential.

Not for the Big Guys

HitBox does have a couple of downsides. For starters, I'd like to be able to remove my own IP address from the tracking, so that my own visits don't affect the reports. But more importantly, the service tracks just one page on your site. You can't use HitBox on multiple pages, so you'll only be able to see how many folks are hitting the page you choose for the HitBox icon. This makes the service much less attractive to large sites that want to track traffic to many pages or sections.

Alternatives to HitBox do exist, including several that can provide more extensive data analysis. But these can be expensive and time consuming. To begin, you may need to ask your ISP if you can access the log files that are automatically created by your Web server. Your provider might offer some sort of tracking software that sorts this info and outputs it to a Web page, but such reports tend to be difficult to read and not terribly attractive. You could also purchase log-file analysis software, though the price can be steep.

If you run a big commercial site, these options might appeal. But for the small site operator, HitBox hits the mark. It lets you sidestep all of these hurdles, providing free access to quick, comprehensive, easy-to-read snapshots of site traffic, plus some useful analysis.

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