Articles & White papers.

The topics are practical in nature, and the articles meant to provide concrete suggestions. Our goal is to offer advice for managing websites or apps and understanding the nuts & bolts of the internet.

If you would like to see an article on a particular subject that is not covered here, please send us a suggestion.

• Third-Party Cookies vs First-Party Cookies

  Who wants a cookie? What are cookies? Here are a few over-lapping definitions; A small data file placed on your computer by a website that you visit. A piece of code placed in your browser by a website server. A text file placed on a hard drive to store and… Continue reading

• Access Facebook user profile data with FB Login

  Use Facebook visitor data to populate your analytics reports Have you ever wanted to have in-depth details about your website visitors or app users? If your users “login with Facebook” and login to your site with their Facebook credentials, you can access… Continue reading

• Hits or pageviews?

  Hits, visitors, visits, pageviews: what are the differences? Technical definition of a hit Each file sent to a browser by a web server is an individual hit. Technical definition of a pageview A pageview is each time a visitor views a page on your… Continue reading

• Online Privacy Issues

  Privacy issues We receive many questions asking us about what tracking services can and can’t do, questions about ‘online profiling’, ‘digital blueprints’ and leaving a ‘data trail’. We have posted numerous articles on the site… Continue reading

• How to write a website Privacy Policy

  a Privacy policy is A privacy policy is a document telling visitors to your site what information you collect and what you do with that information. Very simply: it is a short explanation of what you are doing to observe visitors to your website. Information to… Continue reading

• Definition & Differences Between Hit, Page, and Web Counters

  Hit, Page, and Web Counters –– the difference All three are counters; devices which display the number of visits which have been made to a website or page within a website. Some important differences are: how many pages are measured (single or multiple… Continue reading

• Bounce Rate and Click-through Rate

  What is Bounce Rate? (bouns rāt) n. The bounce rate for the homepage, or any other page through which visitors enter your site, tells you how many people ‘bounce’ away (leave) from your site after viewing one page. So, if the bounce rate from your homepage is… Continue reading

• Queries, Keywords, And Search Terms

  In this article we discuss the loss of search terms, explain the current relevance of queries within Google, and outline our current strategy for building content based on focus keywords. The goal is to understand how your choice of words influences your Marketing and Sales efforts…. Continue reading

• Choosing Search Terms

  Search term keywords e.g. www.google.com/help.html Search terms, also referred to as keywords, are the words, terms, and phrases that visitors use to find your site. There are many ways to work with search terms and keywords. For example, selection of keywords… Continue reading

• Clickstream or clickpath analysis

  What is clickstream analysis? Clickstreams, also known as clickpaths, are the route that visitors choose when clicking or navigating through a site. A clickstream is a list of all the pages viewed by a visitor, presented in the order the pages were viewed, also… Continue reading

• Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and campaign management

  Pay-per-click advertising Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and campaigns are the primary way of advertising on the internet. As of May 2009, the three largest players in the market are Google, Yahoo, and Bing. A PPC campaign lets you determine exactly who comes to… Continue reading

• Web Metrics 101

  If you are looking for information about how to improve your site with stats, please see our article Making Stats Work For You. What are they, and why measure them? There are various terms used to describe the science of recording and interpreting website statistics… .Continue reading

• Improve Google ranking and PageRank

  Google is your friend At the moment, Google is by far the most popular internet search engine in the world. At the time of writing, Yahoo is the second largest, having taken over a majority of remaining smaller engines (Inktomi.com, Altavista.com, fastsearch.com,… Continue reading

• Definitions of Big Data

  Q: Can you please provide me with a definition of Big Data? A: The definition of Big Data is a moving target. In order to make it possible to follow the discussion, as it evolves, we see have started a list of definitions of Big Data, as we read them on the… Continue reading

• How to Buy Traffic

  Pt 1: lead generation and how to buy traffic. 3 pt article. We discuss 3 ways of driving traffic directly to your site, and present our findings. Part one talks about paid inclusion in newsletters, and ads / banners on tech & marketing sites. The 3 articles are… Continue reading

• Buying Traffic – Bulk Clicks

  Part 3 Purchasing bulk leads / traffic / clicks We suspected this was a crazy idea to start with but we had to try it, in order to find out if this sort of traffic works. The answer is that it does not work, and that it is a pure and simple scam. We purchased targeted… Continue reading

• Goal-oriented User Behavior

  Visitor Goals Take-home message: visitor website behavior is goal-oriented. People who visit websites are usually trying to accomplish something. Your job if you work on a website is to facilitate this. There are some essential questions to ask; What are people who… Continue reading

• Tracking vs log analyzers

  Human events versus server activity Why do tracking services show a lower number of visitors than statistics recorded by log analyzers? The answer lies in the difference between unique visitor tracking and log analyzing. Log analyzers record all measurable activity,… Continue reading

• 1-click User-Tagging

  Tag and add notes to Visitor Profiles We are very pleased to finally release User-Tagging, which is now available. User tagging allows you to actually edit the Visitor Profiles for each and every visitor with a simple mouse click. Watch a video that demonstrates… Continue reading

• Search Engine Optimization

  Search engine optimization (Ŏp’tě-mĭ-zā’shěn) n. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of making your website easy to find on the internet. This is done by optimizing your site for the search engines that people use to surf the internet. A well… Continue reading

• Tracking via api.opentracker.net

  Did you know we provide a tracking api? Just log anything you need via log.opentracker.net. Look at our tracking api at http://api.opentracker.net

• EU Cookie Law Confusion

  The European Union has enacted a Cookie Law. As you can imagine the legality surrounding the interpretation and implementation of the law is complex. As a tracking company, we are doing our best to keep abreast of developments. One of the factors complicating the… Continue reading

• Track user logins

  Do your customers login to your website? Did you know that you can send us a signal whenever a person logs in to your website; their email address, user name, account details, loginID, etc? We will place this data into the visitor profile & clickstreams. You… Continue reading

• Buying Traffic – PPC Ad campaigns

  Perhaps not a surprise, but our research has led us to believe that PPC is the “safest” way to get targeted traffic, as you have a high level of control and accountability. Part 2 PPC Pay-per-Click ad campaigns This is the revolution created by the internet… Continue reading

• You’ve Got Data – PPC Search Terms

  Update your PPC campaigns on a regular basis put valuable search term data to work The internet is built on words – here is the data from opentracker reports that we would like to highlight: Top search terms Visitors by search term Companies report – search… Continue reading

• Social Media Advertising

  There is a tremendous movement towards advertising and presence on social media platforms. Facebook recently announced a billion monthly users who have generated more than a trillion likes. Read the BBC story here. Accordingly, advertising patterns are changing. More… Continue reading

• Understanding Big Data

  Part 1: Introduction – Age of Big Data Picture the Second Coming of the Internet, we are just entering the 2nd inning. The whole point of the discussion, and of Big Data, is how to ask the data questions. The data is only valuable if it is used to make decsions… .Continue reading

• Introduction to Big Data

  We’ve published a two-part article called Understanding Big Data. Please click on the titles below to be taken directly to the articles. Part one: Cutting through the Hype Key points: Definition of Big Data What Opentracker does to solve this problem An… Continue reading

• Email-to-a-friend | Send report as PDF

  Send it with 1 click. With one click, you can now send a PDF of a report from the Opentracker interface to any email address. Send a copy of something interesting to yourself for future reference, or email to a colleague, friend, client, manager, etc. Create a… Continue reading

• Why do I need a website tracker?

  Example 1 Did a specific company visit your site?: drill down to the individual. You sent an email to a company and want to see if anybody from that company looked at your website. You can see a list of all visitors from that company, and view their clickstreams through… Continue reading

• Creating web traffic growth

  Change creates growth this leads to The opentracker law of website traffic: Given a constant environment, website traffic will remain unchanged unless you take action. “Unchanged” refers to: the number of new visitors, visitors entering by search… Continue reading

• UTM Parameters

  What are UTM tags? What are the benefits of using UTM parameters? In this how-to you will learn what UTMparameters are and the industry standards on how to use them. The most successful marketers are able to specifically measure how they’re hitting their goals.… Continue reading

• Online advertising strategies

  Sponsored search vs. content networks Q: Where do your ads appear? A: You choose! ‘With great power comes great responsibility’ – from the first Spiderman comic book. Search engines advertising technology puts control in the hands of advertisers… .Continue reading

• Traffic Conversion: Return on Investment (ROI)

  Return on Investment (ROI) Just like a brick-and-mortar business, a website needs careful management to ensure commercial success. Content management decisions should be based on web metrics, not guesswork. Setting measurable business goals and monitoring progress will… Continue reading

• Website Market Position

  General introduction: Your internet market sector Study statisics for your sector of the internet. An analysis of your environment will help you plan, for example where to advertise :: go where people are. Ask why people are going where they go and determine if there is… Continue reading

• Website Market Worksheet

  A worksheet for planning traffic growth This article is part of the series Change Creates Growth. This article addresses our goal to provide practicle tips for increasing traffic in current internet conditions. The worksheet below is made up of questions. The answers… Continue reading

• Drop in traffic conversion

  A Case Study in Usability: What to do when website traffic conversion drops. This article presents a case study in website usability. The goal of the article is to develop strategy for responding to a (sudden) drop in website conversion activity. A conversion is defined… Continue reading

• New Report added – Custom events

  Custom events are events that you can add to the Opentracker reporting interface. You can write information to your database in Opentracker, by sending us any event you want to report on. Once you have gotten things set up so that you can write custom events to your… Continue reading

• Building Online Community

  Building (and measuring) a community of visitors to your site One secret of sites like Facebook, Amazon, ebay, Twitter, and Yahoo is ‘customer loyalty’, which means a community of returning visitors. These sites have generated trust. To begin replicating this… Continue reading

• Big Data Orientation

  Ownership of data This is especially an issue for larger, more traditional companies, for whom data is something that is always kept on-site. Using IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-service) means letting somebody else host, store, and manage your data, so that they… Continue reading

• Using Statistics for Website Management

  Q: “So I’ve added my 4 week trial to our web store pages now how do I get the most out of it? Any help would be greatly appreciated.” A: To get the most out of your trial, and out of a site statistics and tracking program, you need to ask questions… .Continue reading

• Paid Adwords & free Google traffic

  Everyday your site gets traffic from Google. The problem is how to tell whether the visits are paid adwords clicks or referred from free organic results. Here are some sample questions: “How can we tell if google traffic is adwords paid traffic or free… Continue reading

• Show me all Single Girls using my App on an iPhone.

  Data and the Art of Segmentation Based on Social Media Q: What is segmentation: A: Segmentation means categorizing your audience. You collect data and segment or slice it in to different categories. Segmentation is also referred to as filtering. Q: Why is it… Continue reading

• Making stats work for you

  General introduction: making decisions based on stats Understanding website traffic and visitor behavior is crucial to any goal-oriented or business website. Manage your website and make well-informed daily decisions based on the knowledge of who’s visiting and what… Continue reading

• Web analytics dashboard – customer engagement

  Enterprise Dashboard We are very pleased to release a Dashboard, currently available for Enterprise clients. For ten years we have been perfecting the art of displaying a lot of actionable information in a small intuitive space. With the release of our dashboard… Continue reading

• Mobile App terminology

  App is short for applications We support both ‘Native App Tracking’ and ‘Web App Tracking’ together they make up ‘Mobile App Analytics’. The terminology is defined below. Definition of Native apps Native apps are applications… Continue reading

• 10 Tips To Get Through Tough Financial Times

  How can you see where you are going if you can’t see? Use tracking and stats to help you during financial downturns. Use facts and reliable information to make better decisions: how and where to allocate budgets and resources. Generate growth and… Continue reading

• Use Case – using OT to understand your clients

  Case Study for Opentracker Custom Reporting Using the Opentracker Big Data service to get a better understanding of your clients. A special thank you to Patrick Crowley, Digital Content Marketing Manager for ePubDirect, for talking with us. Executive summary: a… Continue reading

• Complexity and Real-time search

  There is complexity everywhere. Crossing the street in the city is an example of complexity. In the case of Opentracker we are specialised in reducing complexity into useful information. What have we learned about Big Data? We’ve learned that the point is not… Continue reading

• Scalable Analytics; High Traffic Website Measurement

  Understanding Change Now available: real-time high volume traffic reporting, think hundreds of thousands, millions, of visitors and page views. We have made our Most Popular Pages report on-demand. We start this article with a quote from the Xoriant blog which… Continue reading

• Updating, Redesigning Or Migrating Your Website Without Losing Analytics

  Every website goes through changes periodically. You can update sections, do a complete redesign, or you can transfer your current website to a new platform or content management system. When doing any of these things there are a number of things you have to think about,… Continue reading

• New Feature. Universal search – starting with search top pages.

  Search for specific pages Opentracker users can now see a Search field in the Top Pages report. This is a “universal search,” kind of like a google search, but through Opentracker. This is something that we have been planning for some time, and… Continue reading

• Populate your CRM with individual visit data

  Hello World! We’ve got this really nifty API which opens with Hello World! (The same historic text runs across our ultra-cool business cards: see below for some eye candy) Can I populate my CRM with visitor data? I see that Opentracker has an API which we… Continue reading

• Social Media Advertising

  There is a tremendous movement towards advertising and presence on social media platforms. Facebook recently announced a billion monthly users who have generated more than a trillion likes. Read the BBC story here. Accordingly, advertising patterns are changing. More… Continue reading

• w3.org and p3p standard privacy policies

  p3p is: Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (p3p) In some instances cookies will not be accepted unless a p3p technical document is provided. The document explains what the cookie is meant to do. Based on security protocols; the intention of the cookie and user… Continue reading

• “Google search” through all your traffic data

  We have released an incredibly powerful feature only available in Opentracker: easily search through all your visitor traffic data in realtime. Q: What does that actually mean? A: that means you can enter any search term that interests you and get results based on… Continue reading

• Why Your Search Terms Don’t Show Up, and What You Can Do About It

  There used to be a time when it was possible to log into analytics tools such as Opentracker to see a wealth of data about keywords; specifically, the keywords people used to find your website. With this information you could then track conversions, and make improvements in… Continue reading

• Increase Your Sales by 30%

  There’s a lot Big Data can do: It can help organizations shore up their bottom lines by helping them review the performance of their departments, gauge the outcomes of their services, track loyalty of their customers and even help weed out non-performing human resources… Continue reading

• How Data Science Is Revolutionizing The Music Industry

  Data science and music is a combination which might baffle a lot of people. After all, how can music be influenced by data? Don’t artists write their own music or sing songs depending on what they think is good? The answer is… Continue reading

• A Sneak Peak At Increasing Sales By 30% And Much More

  From time to time, every CFO or HR personnel has had to answer a perplexing question: What is the ROI here? Am I getting the best bang for the buck? There’s a lot Big Data can do: It can help organizations shore up their bottom lines by … Continue reading

• How Big Data Is Transforming The Aerospace Industry

  In the twenty first century, it is a consensus that data is important. Websites need data to optimize and tailor your experience, businesses need data to understand what their consumers want, even your smart devices at home use data so that they can cater to your needs. In a world where data is so important, it’s actually given rise to a new phenomenon: Big Data… Continue reading

• How To Use SEO To Improve Your Website’s Ranking

  In order to improve website ranking, you need to make sure that there is more traffic. Traffic means that more people are accessing your website which is great for sales and revenue. But how do you do this?… Continue reading

• How To Use An Email List For Business To Your Advantage

  In this article we explain a bit about the history of email lists and newsletters. We explain the role they play. Perhaps more importantly, we have reviewed Industry literature and collected Best Practices (Secrets) which will tell you how to actually leverage the great potential an Email List holds… Continue reading

• How To Create Awesome Content That Resonates With The Reader And Brings In A Lot Of Traffic

  As a business, you have a story to tell and this story telling in the digital age is labeled as content creation. It’s content with a purpose. Good content engages with the reader and creates traffic to your site; traffic that leads to better conversion rates and more sales. But how do you go about doing this?… Continue reading

• 5 Social Media Trends To Watch Out For In 2018 And 2019

  Ever since the world went digital two decades ago, businesses are still trying to figure out how best to leverage the power of social networks in the cyber world to engage with their customers.
  In an ongoing experiment of sorts in establishing brand value and getting customers to positively review their brand, businesses are trying different things. Here’s a roundup of 5 social media trends… Continue reading

• Data Analytics Can Help Grow Your Business:A Low-Down On Growing Your Business In The Cyber Age.

  C-suite executives of Fortune 500 companies have the luxury to tackle one business problem at a time. They usually have billion dollar budgets, an army of managers and other levers at their disposal. Lucky for them, because they are not in the trenches of the battle that so many small and medium sized… Continue reading

• Three Examples Of Business Models Based On Innovate Technology.

  Welcome to the 2nd part of the previous blogpost : The Secret Sauce That Could Help Your Business Grow where discussed about why some businesses are better than others. Emerging technology allows us to both A) send signals and communicate with users (clients) AND B) to analyze the large amounts of data generated in today’s digital world…. Continue reading

• Data Science In The Travel Industry

  How does a website know exactly which vacation advertisement to pull to catch your attention? How does a standard hotel or flight website know exactly what you’re looking for?
  This is where Big Data comes in, and your experience is due to the use of data science in the travel industry….. Continue reading

• Data Science In The Cancer Research

  In light of the World Cancer Day which took place on February 4, we thought that it might be a nice way to show you how data science is actually helping in the research for the cure and treatment of cancer. Millions of people lose their lives or loved ones to cancer each year, and while scientists are doing their best to cure it, there has been only limited progress in finding the cure.. Continue reading

• Why Telecommunication Industry Needs Big Data

  A McKinsey Quarterly report has revealed a report wherein more than 200 telecommunication companies were surveyed regarding their use of Big Data in their day to day operations. Of these, only a quarter, around 80 companies admitted to using Big Data for analysis. While these numbers are bound to raise questions about why the telecommunication industry isn’t as forthcoming as others to use Big Data, an interesting pattern has emerged.. Continue reading

• Here’s How Companies Use Data Science To Launch Product Campaigns

  If you have been wondering about how data science can be used to manipulate audiences into buying merchandise, then you’re not alone. Thousands of people ask this question every day and yet, there’s nothing that we really do about it. In fact, in order to make it big and run a successful business, it almost seems as though luck has a big role in deciding whether you will succeed or not.. Continue reading

• Why We Need Psychological Research Based On Big Data

  Big Data has proven helpful in psychological analysis, especially in analysing, detecting and comparing behavioural patterns in social media, to achieve goals that include targeted marketing and political campaigns; Although, the use of this data in Psychological Research is not as common; Yes, Big Data is used in Psychological Research, but given the reliability of such data, it should be rather emphasized.. Continue reading

• A Modern Customer Profile Template For Smart Businesses

  A customer profile template is a document that helps you detail critical information about your target customers. Then you use the information to run marketing campaigns and reach your target audience. Frankly, you can’t keep all the helpful info about target customers in your head. From their name, interests, down to even their religion — whatever you can think about your customer, include it in the profile… Continue reading

• 7 Powerful Customer Profile Templates For Your Marketing Campaigns

  Do you know why customer profile templates are critical? They’re super important because you have better ways to spend your time than to be designing new customer profiles when you run new marketing campaigns. In this article we’ll be giving away examples and describe the best practices to save you time and money so you can be more effective in marketing, and measure how well your sales campaigns are working.. Continue reading

Latest article added on 3rd May, 2019.