HitsLink More Information Overall Rating: Not Rated Pay Per Click Universe Recommends: AdWatcher - 100% Click Fraud Protection. Concerned about click fraud? Protect your online advertising dollars with the world's most trusted & accurate click fraud solution on the market today. AdWatcher will put a stop to competitors and fraudsters who are looking to drain your hard earned advertising budget. Test-Drive AdWatcher For FREE For 30 Days! HitsLink is a web analytics tool from a California-based company called Net Applications and has been available since 1999. The product works through tracking script that you install on the confirmation pages corresponding to the various actions you wish to track on your site – people signing up for trials of your product, sales of your product, opt-ins for newsletters, etc. HitsLink provides the script for you to paste onto your web pages, and their web servers keep track of the resulting traffic. Hundreds of different statistics can be tracked and the results viewed with HitsLink, all the way from breakdown by country of website visitors on a certain day to tracking which of more than 250 search engines are sending the most traffic to your site. Traffic can be viewed for time ranges from hourly through daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly. Data for specific date ranges can also be accessed. Traffic history, as an example, will show the page views and unique visitors for the timeframe chosen, as well as page views for the prior period, so you can quickly see some comparisons. The resulting data is presented in a variety of ways and referrals are analyzed according to the search terms used, the search engines accessed, and a number of different subsets based on pages. The company offers an advanced version of the program, HitsLink Enterprise, which allows the user to create and track campaigns on the fly, helping with ROI analysis of Google and Yahoo! pay-per-click campaigns. Other referral sources (partners and affiliates) and user-defined events can be tracked in real-time instantly as separate campaigns and specialized event tags. HitsLink supports most shopping cart systems (including MIVA), so you can see statistics on which search terms led to actual transactions, including the amount of the purchases involved, and conversion rates based on the number of searches for each term tracked. The system can even track repeat customers and the percentage of repeat transactions during specific time periods. Users can set up email alerts by hour, day, or week when traffic levels you define are reached or spikes in traffic occur. Reports and the online dashboard can be customized to your needs. Your site’s ranking for specific search terms on the top search engines and its link popularity are easily accessed. Potential click fraud can be noted by looking for repeat clicks by IP address, country of origin, etc. HitsLink offers a free 30-day trial of the system, up to 20,000 page views. Actual cost starts at $9.95 per month, with pricing points dependent upon volume of page views (calculated on the previous month’s volume). For $9.95, you only are allowed up to 1,000 page views per month; the next price point is $19.95 per month for up to 10,000 page views, followed by a jump to up to 50,000 page views for $29.95 per month, and correspondingly higher cost as page views increase further. The Enterprise Edition starts at $14.95 per month for the same 1,000 page views, and moves to $29.95 for up to 10,000, and $44.95 for up to 50,000. You can track multiple websites, with the sum of the traffic to all the sites you are tracking billed according to the pricing schedule, plus $1 per extra site per month. With Google Analytics providing a great deal of the same kind of information at no charge, it is more difficult these days for products like HitsLink to persuade users of the efficacy of their solutions. Still, it is almost always a good idea to check more than one option before settling on a preferred method, and the free trial of HitsLink should afford you the opportunity to see if the program will suit your needs in a fashion that makes subscription worthwhile. |
