OK. This has been bugging me for a few weeks now. Since there was a thread in the NetPond blogging forum about 3rd party stats tracking for blogger blogs.

A couple were found that offered free stats tracking with invisible tracking images. Right off the bat the red lights started flashing in the back of my mind. You see, I understand on a very deep level the NOTHING is really truely free. Some one pays for everything. You may get something at a 100% subsidization, but you don’t get anything “free”.

So with that in mind, the principle is that in order to offer something for “free” to one group of people another person or persons must subsidize that “free” service in some way, or the originator is subsidizing it fully.

The more costly a thing is to produce the more unlikely such a subsidization scheme is to be offered. No one gets subsidized Rolls Royces.

A stats tracking system is bound to become expensive to opperate over time and with more users. There is bandwidth (both in tracking and in reporting the stats), there is stats storage, there is processing (and this is going to get big), there is customer support, there is upgrade and maintainance of the software, and more.

So why would some one give this away free, or more accurately, subsidize it at a 100% level?

I couldn’t come up with an angel on this one at first, but it sat there niggling me since the thread started.

Earlier today I stumbled across a service that offer not only 3rd party stats tracking, but click tracking as well. Indeed they can even track clicks on your **adsense** ads. Very useful service no?

But then it clicked.

What are you sending to this service when you use it?

1. Your URL.
2. Refferer URLs linking in to your page.
3. key words searched at the engines to find your page.
4. serp page position of your page.
5. link and link text clicked on by your surfers.
6. ads clicked on by your users.

In short you are sending this unknown 3rd party your ***ENTIRE MARKETING PLAN***

Now I don’t know about you, but that makes me just a little nervous. By using this service I have told this unknown 3rd party EXACTLY how to beat me with my best keyword and marketing strategies.

I’m not calling out any specific company. I have no evidence of any company doing anything like this. Maybe I’m dead wrong. But when it comes to my marketing plan, does it make sense to take a risk on something this big?

I don’t think so, especially given that there are plenty of goor stats and link tracking packages you can buy, install and control and some that are even GPL. Just do a search at hotscripts.com for click tracking or stats tracking.

Reference Lookup: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia, & More
powered by PostRef

Dane Morgan wrote this around lunchtime: