Tales from the Techside

This industry amazes me sometimes.

When I first traveled to a native fishing reservation off the northwest coast of BC in 1980 for the first of what was to be many glorious summers, I was immediately struck by the curious cultural echo. The music that I was really into 3 years before was popular there and then. Over the next 8 years I watched that gap shrink as technology intruded further and further into that little village. The last time I was there in 2005, I immediately hopped on a dell laptop from my porch, connected wirelessly and hopped to my desktop at work.

That small fishing village of 300 T’simsian native americans has bridged the technology divide more successfully than the REALTOR® industry.

In fact, when I first started working within this industry, I was intrigued and enthused, thinking; “this is great, these people need some help.” After a time in the industry, the emphasis has shifted to a different word.

So it is not too surprising that the industry that just discovered the concept of ROI online, and that still routinely brings you hit counters on web sites, would be taken by a tool like visistat. Don’t get me wrong, it provides a nice visual package for statistics on web traffic, but it is a service that you can get for free elsewhere, as I have already written about in articles on SEO.

Awstats is the best, most well rounded free package that I have come across, but feel free to suggest others. Awstats does require installation and configuration of a perl module, but any host/webmaster worth their salt is either already offering it, or can do so easily. Statistics are also available from a host of third party sources for free, not the least of which is googles webmaster tools. Sources like google require little effort as opposed to visistat’s model, which to execute properly requires a little simple headiner include coding. This is not hard, but when you can get the same thing elsewhere for free…

Knowing your webstats is a crucial part of maximizing your ROI. Who is visiting, when, for how long, etc. These factors are the lifeblood of your web presence. If, in the end, you feel that you need to pay the $20/month fee to have this information spoon fed, it may well be worthwhile. I personally recommend taking a little time to investigate the free options, and in the process get a better sense of what you are looking for, and why. I suspect that in doing so, you will discover that you can gain the visibility that you are looking for in a lot of ways, and that involving yourself in doing so is both fascinating and rewarding.

What I am interested in from visistat’s recent press release are the overall market statistics for internet usage in 2007. This trends report has some fascinating numbers.

Usage times:

* Peak Activity - Hour: 9 PM
* Peak Activity - Day: Monday
* Peak Activity - Month: March
* Repeat Visitors: 47%
* Average Visitor Click Path: 14 pages
* Overall Traffic Growth from 2006: 36.8%

How traffic gets to RE sites:

60.2% Type-In Traffic: When a visitor types a Website address (URL) into their browser address bar, it is considered type-in traffic, which is Website traffic that originates from the URL being typed instead of from a Search Engine or Referral Link.
23.6% Search Engine Traffic: All visitor traffic originating from a query within a Search Engine, such as Google or Yahoo, is segmented into this count.
16.2% Link/Referral Traffic: When a visitor clicks a link on another Website, such as a banner or a text link, the location is recorded as a reference

Overall, after signing up for the trial and seeing what I would get for $20/month, I would give Visistat a B-. If you aren’t doing anything to track and improve your online presence, I would recommend that you give it a shot for a few months, at least to get a sense of what you should be looking at.

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