What You Really Need to Understand About Your Website’s Visitors
Imagine you work as a cashier at a grocery store. Every day, you watch customers come in and look around, maybe spend a bit more time in one aisle, or miss another aisle altogether. Grocery stores have become experts at studying and controlling consumer behavior. But how can you take advantage of that, if your store is online?
Just like grocers, website owners can benefit greatly from a better understanding of the behavior of their visitors. There are many web analytic tools online that offer these services, allowing you to see how many visitors you receive, where they come from, whether they are frequent visitors, how long they spend on your site, and which pages they view. Understanding visitor activity allows you to develop your website to meet their needs and increase its effectiveness.
Examples of web analytics tools include Google Analytics, StatCounter, and Yahoo! Web Analytics. Each allows you to track visitors, including whether they are new or returning visitors, how long their visit lasts, how they came to your site, and sales activity.
However, these popular analytics tools fall short when it comes to malicious visitors. Some of these users may be there to rob your merchandise, or deface your website, or spy on your customers, or even exploit your business to attack other websites. To return to our metaphor, a brick-and-mortar grocery store is less vulnerable than an unprotected website. It has attentive workers everywhere, capable of helping customers and catching shoplifters and other troublemakers. There may even be CCTV cameras and mirrors placed to monitor customers. And there is likely a security system to protect from intrusion when the store is closed at night. But how can we apply an analytics system that sorts the good traffic from the bad?
What you need is a good web application firewall, or WAF, which secures your website and acts as your first and last line of security. It is your attentive worker, your CCTV camera, your security alarm, and your “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service” sign, all wrapped up in one — although this being the web, shirt and shoes are optional. Of all the WAPs out there, the best is Cloudbric. It is affordable for small businesses, offers an all-inclusive package of security features, and provides advanced protection to keep intruders at bay and regular customers happy.
FREE SERVICE
Just like a security company would charge less to protect a tiny corner store than it would a big-box store, Cloudbric is free to use for websites that receive less than 4 gigabytes of traffic per month.
COMPREHENSIVE PROTECTION
Cloudbric uniquely offers comprehensive services, whereas other WAFs put a price tag on some of their more important services such as DDoS and SQL injection attack prevention. You are billed based on web traffic rather than access to important protection features, meaning small websites are protected from all types of attacks.
ADVANCED PROGRAMMING
Cloudbric’s service is superior to other WAFs, running on a logic analysis engine rather than pattern recognition. This is like having a store detective who can suss out bad behavior, rather than a wall of photos of previously caught troublemakers.
MINIMAL WORK AND MAXIMUM FREEDOM
With Cloudbric, you can easily and effectively track how visitors use or misuse your website. You can even block traffic by specific country and IP. This gives you control over suspicious visitor activity on your website. Cloudbric requires a minimum amount of work and gives you a maximum degree of control over your visitor traffic.
Whether your website uses analytics software or not, Cloudbric’s technology is still necessary to monitor and prevent malicious activity. Cloudbric gives you that layer of protection while also allowing you to monitor suspicious activity.