Recent user FAQ

Can Opentracker.net be used as an e-mail tracking system?
How does Opentracker distinguish between new and returning visitors?
What is “click-thru rate”?
What is “bounce rate”?
I am tracking multiple sites. Where can I switch between site reports?
Can I see what a person who typed in a specific search word did on my site?

Can Opentracker.net be used as an e-mail tracking system?

When my company sends out e-mailings, we want to see who views them. Thanks,

Larry Kantor
Synergyworld.com

Opentracker can track emails which are written in html, and sent as html mailings.

We can tell you how many people open the emails, and who follows links from the emails to your site or any other page where our code is installed.

Note: the email tracking information will be aggregated in your website stats, therefore we suggest a separate 'site' account for tracking html mailings.

How does Opentracker distinguish between new and returning visitors?

The returning visitor is a visitor who visits your site with a 24 hour period in between. Its very strict.
Secondly, we measure visits, a visit is a visitor’s clickstream broken by a ten minute period, (minimum of ten minutes). So you have a cup of coffee, and return to the site, this will be a second visit. Say you go to bed, and you return to the site the next day; you will be a returning visitor.

We measure visitors by giving them a cookie, this cookie is unique to the browser, assuming the user continues to utilise the same browser without deleting his/ her cookies. We have found that cookies are often more reliable over the long time, as many servers re-assign IP addresses on a regular basis.

In other words, unless the user deletes his/her cookies continuously, she/ he will be measured as the same visitor with each session.

Strictly speaking, “one” means “one person” based on the definitions given above. So that if someone continuously visits your site over large periods of time, they will be recorded only as one person, again, given the definitions above.

What is “click-thru rate”?

I’m trying your service and find it not only informative, but delivers information previously unavailable to my business. Thanks for some good info.

Onto my question: I understand “click-thru rate” represents the percentage of people that arrive at my site from a banner ad or other active link to my website – correct? Since I have no banner ads placed currently, then the my click-thru rate must then be people arriving from an active link on another site. Just looking to confirm that I understand this properly.

John Ellerbrock
GatesHousings.com

You ask a good question, to answer; click-thru rate, where it is reported under “bounce rate”, does not tell you how many people are clicking thru to your site from somewhere else, i.e. compared to Google’s click-thru ratio (CTR) which tells you how many people click through a banner.

So the answer is no. This is a confusing subject, because we are dealing with two types of click-through rates here. What the rate reported on the Bounce Rate screen does do is let you know how far into your site your visitors are surfing. So it tells you the percentages of people who click-thru into your site beginning from the first page where they enter.

Your Bounce rate for the last seven days (set this on the small calendar), for example, tells you that only 35% of your visitors bounced away from where they entered (presumably your homepage) which is a very good, low, bounce rate. Opentracker is 30% for the same time period, which is a good rate.

So to answer the second part of your question, the click-thru rate does not tell you that people are coming to your site from a link somewhere else.

To access that information, you should check your Top Lists >> referrers, and Visitors >> referred statistics

These lists tell you from which pages visitors were referred to yours, and includes screenshots of the pages from where they came.

What is "Bounce rate"?

Trying a trial of Opentracker. I have personally done searches on Google and then clicked on the site pages that I have added tracking code to, trying to generate a bounce rate, but the bounce rate says no data available. Why?

Jim Gilbert
www.positionconcepts.com

The bounce rate (or more optimistically click through rate) is a measurement of how deep visitors go into your site. It is not related to search queries.

Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who visit your web site and leave without getting any further than one page (bounce).

Certain statistics (like bounce rate) are "undefined" until all the users events have elapsed. i.e. the depth of page views (amount of clicks) of a visit is not defined until the visit is over.

On the whole you will notice that some stats lag until the visit has actually ended, simple because during a visit a number of statistical qualities are not defined yet (such as the duration of the visit... because its still going on). Much like you can't say how much money I have spent in a store until I check out all the items at the cash register...

For real time statistics (without the lag) you can check out "online visitors". The green visitor icon represents a current visitors (realtime, the visitor is looking at your site). The red visitor icon represents an elapsed visit (the person isn't looking at your site anymore).

Only red visitors (people who aren't on your site at any more) are added to all the visitor statistics (ie they checked out).

If you haven’t done so already, check out the "online visitors" page, and click on a green or red visitor to see what that person has viewed up to now. You'll also notice how the visit is defined, and get a grasp of what is being measured.

Notes

On the world wide web sites are rated and measured by their "bounce rate", used to determine how quickly visitors "bounce" away. For example, a site with a bounce rate of 25% (meaning that only 25% of visitors bounce away after one page view) is considered very good.

Campaigns

This information can be used to analyze the success of content changes. For example, if you decide to decrease the number of single page sessions through a targeted campaign. On the world wide web many sites suffer from visitors who exit visits after a single page view. You can use this tool to evaluate campaigns which you have designed to prevent traffic from bouncing away after a single-page view.

I am tracking multiple sites. Where can I switch between site reports?

To switch between the different domains that are in your account, you click on the “profile” button, where you will see this:

Current site: and a drop-down box.

If you place your cursor on the box, all of the sites for which you have permissions will appear. Select the site you wish to view. You will be taken to stats overview for that site.

Can I see what a person who typed in a specific search word did on my site?

Here you will see all the recent searches that led visitors to our site: both the search engine, and the search phrase they typed in.

From there it is easy to see what they did onour site, by clicking on the green or red puppets; this will take you directly to their click-stream.