Complete Web Monitoring

They Aren’t Doing What You Think They Are

The lesson here is that your visitors might not be doing what you think they are. While sometimes—as in the travel agency model—they’re still doing something related to your business, there are other times when their reasons for visiting are entirely alien.

Consider, for example, online games like PMOG and WebWars. In these games, players install browser plug-ins that let them view websites in different ways than those intended by the site operator. In PMOG, a user can plant traps on your website that other players might trigger, or leave caches of game inventory for teammates to collect.

In Webwars, players compete for dominance of popular websites based on the stature of that site in a web-wide version of the board game Risk, as shown in Figure 7-2.

Figure 7-2. A WebWars player competing for the Boingboing.com website in a game, rather than interacting with it

Other “overlays” to the web let people comment on sites using plug-ins like firef.ly—shown in Figure 7-3—or use site content for address books and phone directories, as Skype does.

Figure 7-3. The Fort Lauderdale Sheriff’s Office website, showing Firefly chats happening atop the site

VOC may not show you why these people are visiting the site—indeed, there’s no easy way to tell they’re playing ...