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I posted a brief intro to the value ovf careful tracking and I think some of the less I.T. literate "specialists" on this site moderated it out of existence, but never mind.
As I said in that post, I was alarmed to find that awstats, webalizer and most shockingly of all Google Webmaster Tools failed to record above 70% of the details of people visiting my site via search engines - which means that a LOT of hard work by seo operators is down the toilet simply because they are not able to have a genuinely clear picture of what has worked and what hasn't.
Nowadays I am using fully fledged bespoke tracking, following the movements of every user in every possible way, recording it permanently and allowing exhaustive cross-reference.
I publish this (again) as a warning to ailing webmasters: don't ever rely on someone else's tracking tools even the "in built" ones on your hosting, even if you have set the whole server up yourself - you'll be shocked at how much they lose and how all that a server monitors on its own can look quite different to what you would have monitored yourself.
As I said in the deleted post (manners?) one thing you will be shocked by is that your average stats methodology involves pressing summary data and throwing away the details - but rather than throwing away the orange peel alone you are, unknowingly, throwing away 40 to 50% of the juice...
So anyway, I have one more post to make in a different topic area so I'll wrap this up.
Another question I have wondered is how "webmaster" talk has absolutely no coverage of tracking - it is the one issue which, when treated properly, is the make or break between rich or not.
In my case I found out that currently where ordinary stats programmes are showing no noticeable increase of traffic or keywords since last month the actual change is from 3 to 5 phrases and 6 or 8 people coming in from those phrases to 150 phrases and about 300 to 350 off those phrases - next month I know that the phrasecount will go up to about 800 or 900, so that should be fun, and profitable.
Anyway, let's hope the moderators are more intelligent about what is valuable info and what isn't this time?!!! Still, if they don't it's okay, this time I'll keep a pdf copy for my own reference. These notes help me as much as you.
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Tracking is an overlooked art
