Knowing exactly how visitors find and interact with your site is very valuable information that you can use to help boost your "click to close" ratio. However, most of the Web statistics services currently available offer a mind-numbingly large array of graphs and charts that can be confusing and well...boring to read. Now there is a unique way to track your site visitors in real time that not only makes their visits more “real,” it can also be used as a powerful listing tool.

I have to confess something to you that I am not particularly proud of: I installed HitBox, one of the most comprehensive Website statistics packages you can buy, on my RUSSER.com Website months ago and not once looked at the stats (tell me it's not so!) I know, I know you would think that "Mr. Internet" would be pouring over those charts and graphs at least once a week. Well, not this cat --like you and I have better things to do and places to go. And frankly, I always found all those numbers and chart rather boring.

Statistics Were Never This Much Fun!

That has all changed thanks to a very clever and unique service called Visitorville. Like HitBox, this is a Web-based site statistics service, with a twist. It lets you actually "see" visitors arriving, moving around, and leaving your site in real time! This is very similar to the look and feel of the Sims computer game.

There is a map of your site (either a downtown city setting or a suburban housing setting) where each building represents a different page of your site. Visitors arrive on buses with special buses named "Google," "Yahoo," etc. for those that arrive via each respective search engine.

Upon arrival, the bus takes off from the bus station and "drives" to the particular page the visitor lands on first. You actually see them get off the bus and walk into the building (this is so cool!) and the building lights up when one or more visitors are there. When a visitor clicks to another page of your site, you see a cab pick them up and deliver them to the next page they are visiting.

To see this in action CLICK HERE and view a flash movie of how I use Visitorville to view my RUSSER.com site activity.
(NOTE: requires a high-speed connection)

Know Thy Customer

As people visit your site you can also see a list of active visitors on the left side of the screen. By double-clicking on any one of them, it will display their "passport" which tells you just about everything you would want to know, including: their geographical location (most of the time), if they are a repeat visitor, what search phrase and engine (if any) they used to find your site, the type of browser they use, etc.

The other reports it provides are very useful to determine what pages of your site are most popular and how much time they spend in any one tracked section, plus a whole lot more. It can even track (if appropriately set up) which forms your visitors complete or special reports they download from your site. This is an extremely important guage of how appealingly interactive your site is to your target market.

Blow Your Sellers' Minds

Visitorville has a unique "VCR" feature that lets you playback the map activity over any previous period up to 100 times faster (in terms of time compression) than normal. Now imagine what prospective sellers would say when they see all those prospective buyers checking out your listings. Suddenly, your online marketing efforts just became more "real."

This is the real power of Visitorville —by allowing you to actually "see" your site visitors in real time, it "tangiblizes" the fact that these are real people who may be quite interested in purchasing your listings. It turns boring statistics into a highly engaging process of seeing potential buying activity.

Getting Started

Visitorville has many more features and benefits than I can't go into here. It is surprisingly affordable and starts out at about $19/mo which is good for tracking up to 300 unique visitors/day. It is also easy to install by adding a small bit of code to every page on your site you want to track (by "easy" I mean for your Webmaster).

Tracking how visitors interact with your Website is important if you want to maximize your online business. Now, thankfully, it can be fun as well as rewarding!