Are your competitors tracking you?

If Your Site Employs This Very Common Tool, You May Be Leaving Yourself Open For Trouble. Your competitors may be getting information straight from your site that they are using to get the best of you.

XTREME Tracking
Talk about leaving yourself wide open to exploitation. If your small business web site is employing this very common item on your page, you need to be very careful.

I want to bring this to your attention because the possibility for abuse is pretty strong. Its up to you to decide how ethical this is. At least you will know the risks to your own site if you employ this.

Many small business web sites do.

I am talking about using free web statistic programs on your web page.

For example the Xtreme tracking package is employed by a lot of sites. Usually you can tell these by this small graphic which is frequently at the very bottom of the web page:

By signing up for their free service, you get to monitor all sorts of interesting information about your site. Where your visitors came from, who sent them if they were referred, what keywords they used to get there, how many visitors you get a day etc.

The issue with many of these free services, is that ANYONE can check out your statistics. There is no password protection on them.

By simply clicking on the graphic, any visitor to your site can explore the inner workings of your site traffic. These visitors can include your competitors.

A competitor can easily determine who is sending you a lot of traffic. They can then make arrangements with them to start sending some (or all) of that traffic their way instead. This could be done by offering a better deal to under cut you.

Your competitors can also research what keyword phrases people are using to reach your site. By knowing this, they can create specific web pages targeting those keywords. They can also create pay-per-click advertising campaigns around those keywords.

It is extremely surprising the number of small business web sites which employ these free stats programs. I have a seen one of the very top known online gurus have one on his site. I could not believe it. His whole inner workings of the traffic he has worked hard to build up is revealed for the world to see.

If you are insistent on having these free stat trackers on your site, you may at least want to minimize the chance someone will stumble across it. If it possible for you, you can set the size dimensions on the graphic to 1x1 pixel. This small dot will serve as your entrance point to the web stats. At least it is not a blaring billboard shouting out for attention.

Your much better option is paying the few dollars a month if you like their service. They will give you a password protected stat page. They may also include more statistics in the paid version.

Probably Not Necessary

The ironic thing about these statistic trackers is that a majority of web site hosting companies offer this service already. Most include some version for free. These versions work behind the scenes and are not accessible for the whole world to dig through.

Send your hosting company an email. Ask them if you have a web site statistics program and if so, how do you access it.

You definitely should be tracking your traffic on a fairly frequent basis. You can learn a lot about the performance of your site. Just do it in a manner that you are not educating your competition with this information also.