Lesson #10 Tracking Your Gallery Traffic
Written By Titmowse

Obtaining statistics about traffic on your gallery has never been easier. The adult Internet helped develop and refine the cookie method of visitor analysis. Programmers who write tracking code are well paid and busy. Fortunately for you, you can acquire ready-made codes and tracking services for little or no money at all. The most common of this tracking is the adult site counter.

A counter service will track your traffic on your gallery or site or wherever the counter code is placed on your web. You sign up for a counter by giving your contact information and usually the main URL of your website. Once your membership has been approved, you are then given the counter code to cut and paste into your web. That counter code contains cookies, which are small auto-downloading programs to your visitor's browser software. These unobtrusive little robots can tell you what page your surfer came from, what country they reside in, what browser they use and sometimes, where they go after they leave your gallery.

Once you've placed a counter on your main site or gallery, you can see what TGPs are sending you hits. You can tell what of your many galleries get the most hits. You can see what search terms they used to find your gallery. You can even see what country the came from and what time of day they visited your thumbnails.

How can you apply this once expensive data?

Well for instance, if you find you're getting a great deal of traffic to your site from Japan, you could start marketing to them directly with sponsors like Hentai paysites. If you get a lot of daytime traffic, you could assume you're getting hits from people surfing the net at their jobs. You could add an adult-friendly job search on your adult site that pays you for sign-ups. You'll know not to waste your time with unproductive TGPs and which ones garner you the best conversions. You might even be interested to know who liked your gallery so much, they added it to their browser's favorites file.

The way that counters for adult websites can offer you this free information is that they make income from your visitors who click on their banner/code/text link. They also include your main site in their link list, which is basically a giant TGP/Top List. You're providing content for your counter service so the trade is fair, especially for your end.

There are common rules about counter trackers both from the TGPs and the counter services.

Many TGPs do forbid counters on your gallery pages. They claim that the codes are either bandwidth hogs or that a counter should be for a main page type website and not a gallery. Counter programs want you to put the biggest of their graphical banners on your site in a prominent place. They make the counter look just like any paysite/sponsor banner and the bigger it is, the more hits/conversions their paysites site will get.

You should always read the rules of any TGP to which you submit a gallery. You need to determine if a counter on your submission will or will not be to your detriment. You'll want to read the terms of service for you counter program just as carefully. You will get hits from using the counter from the provider and will get more if you display their counter in the best, possible place.

Some of the net's most notable adult counter services are:

Sex List
(http://www.sexlist.com)
Massive counter service that ads you to their main list. These folks have it all: Country, search engine keywords, exit stats and even trackers for multiple websites.

Sex Tracker
(http://sextracker.com)
One of the oldest counter for adult sites on the Internet, this program gives meticulously detailed statistics through their breathtaking console interface.

For more information and listings of counter services for your galleries, visit the Cozy Academy Library!