by Peter Cooper

Do you want to keep tabs on the people who use your site and, perhaps, make some money too? If so, the HitBox Tracker might prove to be a good choice for you. It's an extremely comprehensive tracker which has an optional 10-cents per-click banner system. If you'd rather not have a large banner on your page, you can still use the tracker for free by just using a small button. More important than this though, how does this immensely popular tracker perform?

Signing Up

When I found the sign-up page for the HitBox Tracker, I nearly cried. They need you to answer twenty different questions. I took a deep breath and started to fill them in, and I shouldn't have worried. The questions are, mostly, non intrusive and easy to answer, with six of them having easy 'Yes/No' answers. A number of the questions are also used to list your site in the Yep.com search engine, which may provide a small boost to your Web site traffic. A couple of the questions are related to receiving HitBox's e-mail newsletter. I have heard that this is a relatively useful newsletter, especially if you're still building your Web site. You can, of course, choose not to receive it by choosing 'No' on the relevant question.

After entering my details, I was greeted with another screen which asked which HitBox graphic I wanted to display on my site. You can choose between a small rectangular button or a large 468x60 banner advert. The choice may initially seem obvious, but the major difference is that if you display the banner, you will be paid 10 cents for every one of your visitors who clicks on it. If you're looking for a low maintenance way of making some money with your Web site, you may find this useful.

Installing the Tracker

After choosing to just show the regular HitBox button on my site, my account was created immediately and I was taken to a page with the HTML code to add to my page. To my pleasant surprise, they also provide comprehensive instructions for users of WYSIWYG packages from Microsoft FrontPage to Macromedia Dreamweaver which makes this tracker an excellent choice if you're HTML-phobic, or just don't want to dig around with Notepad. The actual installation of the tracker is made very quick and easy thanks to HitBox's easy-to-follow instructions, so you don't need to worry about getting stuck.

I only found one thing confusing while pasting in the code I was issued. They require that you replace each instance of 'NAME+OF+PAGE+HERE' with the name of your site. I wondered why they'd want you to do this since you already entered the name of your site on the previous screen. Surely they could automatically put it in for you? Alas, it wasn't to be, but this simple operation only takes several seconds to complete.

As well as providing the code to get the tracker onto your main page, HitBox also supplies some additional code which allows you to place the tracker on all of your site's pages. You need to replace the 'NAME+OF+PAGE+HERE' in each instance with a unique name, so that the tracker can differentiate between pages, but this isn't hard to do. It means you get the benefit of extended information about more pages on your Web site, rather than just the main index.html.

Once the code has been entered into whichever pages you desire, the tracker will start to work immediately, and you can also view your statistics straight away. To find out how to view them, you need to wait until you receive your confirmation e-mail from HitBox. I received it after just a minute, and the URL of your statistics page is enclosed. Click on the link and you'll be taken to your statistics page immediately.

Even though I had selected 'No' to password protecting my statistics, the page asked me for my password. This was only a small issue, but didn't seem consistent with my requests while setting the tracker up. Everything else seemed fine, so I continued to be greeted with a pleasantly laid out statistics page. But, what do all the figures mean?

Understanding Your Reports

Most of the statistics offered by HitBox are commonplace in advanced tracking or web statistics programs. The amount of statistics that HitBox offers you are absolutely mindboggling and there are over forty major different types of information for you to peruse.

Here's a brief rundown of the main headings that HitBox divides the information into:

• Traffic - The Traffic Summary covers the current day's traffic, as well as averages and forecasts over a day, week or month. In this section you can also get information such as how often people reload your site and the busiest hours of each day.

• Referrers - Want to know how people got to your site? Now you can find out.

• System - Provides information about the systems that your visitors are using when visiting your site. This can be useful so you can tweak the site to your visitors' requirements.

• Visitors - This section allows you to find out where your visitors are from, how loyal they are, and what ISPs they use.

• Navigation - A mind boggling array of information is available here such as the routes which people take through your site and how long they stay there.

• Pages - Here you can find the most used pages on your site, files not found, broken links and the most popular entry and exit pages of your site.

• Revenue - If you chose to display the 10-cents per-click banner on your site, you'll get a revenue page detailing how much you've been earning.

Extra Features

At the time of writing, HitBox offers two other main tracking systems, which are chargeable services, namely: Pro and Enterprise. The Pro version is exactly the same as the regular HitBox tracker I've reviewed here except that you have no obligation to put their tracker graphic or banner on your page. This makes the tracker seem totally transparent, and you don't run the risk of losing visitors by clicking on the HitBox graphic. The Enterprise version is similar but you also get lots of extra features, for a higher fee.

Conclusion

The wide range of features offered by HitBox makes it an irresistible choice. However, a down side is that the button you have to display is somewhat larger and more intrusive than that provided by rival tracker Extreme-DM.

The statistics are presented in a fairly clean format, although I found it slightly more confusing to use than the Extreme-DM system. Of course, HitBox provides a much wider range of information and has far more features, so this is to be expected.

Overall, I found the system easy to sign up with, easy to install (thanks to all the instructions) and having access to such a wide range of statistics was excellent and kept me glued to the statistics site for ages! HitBox truly provide a wonderful product.

Speed: 4/5
Ease of Use: 4/5
Features: 5/5