Measuring Web Traffic, Essay Example

Measuring web traffic and the effectiveness of marketing efforts can be done by means of various proven techniques. The core metric is ultimately the number of sales resulting from a specific effort, which can be tracked by means of transaction logs (Turban et al., 2010, p. 162). Log file analysis tools allow companies to “get a good idea of where visitors are coming from, how often they return, and how they navigate through a site” (p. 162). Moreover, the shopping cart program used by the vendor is a source of useful data, which can be “combined with information in the transaction log to reveal more insights” (p. 162). Companies can also track users’ clickstream behavior, “a pattern of their movements on the Internet”, and analyze it in order to ascertain “which promotions are effective and which population segments are interested in specific products” (pp. 162-163).

Cookies, web bugs and spyware are other means of tracking user behavior online (Turban et al., 2010, p. 163). Cookies are programs that “allow a Web site to store data on the user’s PC; when the customer returns to the site, the cookies can be used to find what the customer did in the past” (p. 163). Web bugs, often combined with cookies, are “tiny graphics files embedded in e-mail messages and on Web sites” which gather and transmit “information about the user and his or her movements to a monitoring site” (p. 163). Spyware is software “that gathers user information through an Internet connection without the user’s knowledge” is arguably unethical (p. 163). These methods are controversial; personally, I favor cookies because I as a user do not find them unduly intrusive, and do not think they constitute a violation of users’ privacy. I find web bugs ethically problematic, inasmuch as they monitor the user without the user’s prior consent, and spyware even more so, inasmuch as it “stays on the user’s hard drive and continually tracks the user’s actions, periodically sending information on the user’s activities to the owner of the spyware” (p. 163).