Search Marketing Insomniac…The Blog of Adam Henige

iWebtrack.  Bad company or bad people?

After my last installment lashing out at iWebtrack for never responding to my many requests for an explanation for their continued charges after obviously opting out of their free trial, I thought I would register for another trial account just to see if customer service was in a coma or not.

So on December 30th I whipped up a freebie account and filled out a form.  I received an immediate response email and then sat and did nothing.  A week later I went back to check the account.  I wasn’t expecting much, but much like Ralphie in a Christmas story, my Red Rider BB Gun had arrived!

I'm going to shoot my eye out!

My pal Garrett, whom I had left a couple voicemails for at his direct extension had finally acknowledged my existence!  Apparently the allure of erroneously charging someone’s credit card again was just too tempting!

No secret decoder ring needed!

Thanks Garrett!  I’ll get right on that trial activation!  Can’t wait to get started…or wait, has it ended yet?

In other actions of questionable web analytics ethics, I dug up this doozy which I can’t believe I failed to find before now…

A poster by the name of Quazar on the Webmaster world forum originally posted this item here, so all credit is due to him, but I felt compelled to repost:

I was curious if anyone else has noticed this. I have been using iwebtrack.com for years and for the first time I noticed that they have placed an invisible hyperlink in the javascript tracking code. This has nothing to do with tracking visitors and everything to do with SEO.

<NOSCRIPT>
<img alt=”iWebTrack” border=”0″ width=”0″ height=”0″ src=”http://stats.iwebtrack.com/nTrack.asp?id=#*$!xx&java=no”>
<a href=”http://www.iwebtrack.com“>web analytics</a>
</NOSCRIPT>

This has created over 82,000 backlinks according to MSN and given them a PR8 with Google. Some sites have literally placed thousands of free links to iwebtrack.com on their site without even knowing it. I guess my biggest concern without getting into the “ethics” is what kind of effect this could have or has already had on the sites that pay them for their services. From my understanding this is in violation of Google, MSN and Yahoos quality guidelines. Who is to say that one of the major search engines won’t come out with a filter that could pick this up as spam? If one of them did anyone using their tracking services could potentially be jeopardizing their current rankings. I would also suspect this could be effecting their customers search positions right now (off theme outbound linking, Page Rank Bleeding, KWD, ect).

I decided to remove the link from the code on all of my sites that I use iwebtrack.com for tracking and thought I would pass this along to others that use their service. All you need to do is remove the <a href=”http://www.iwebtrack.com“>web analytics</a> from the <NOSCRIPT> portion of the code.

Would love to know what others in the forum think.

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So there you have it.  I would once again encourage anyone to stay away from this company, as once again, there are FAR BETTER WEB ANALYTICS OPTIONS AVAILABLE.

End rant…for now.

People who know me well will tell you that when I am not feeling well or injured, I whine a lot.  I have many old sports injuries that nag, and I will gladly complain about them.  Outside of that, though, I don’t complain much…unless it is warranted.

This brings me to web analytics provider IWebtrack.  Similar to other javascript web analytics providers, they offer a low end subscription service for your interface and data.  Being the web analytics dork that I am, I signed up for their 30 day trial in April just to see what they had to offer.

I was greeted with a fairly standard array of reports, sufficient for small business needs, but on the whole rather underwhelming.  As IndexTools moved to a free service and Google continued to improve, IWebtrack didn’t really provide anything that would make me continue paying for their service.

So, as per the instructions on their user agreement, I removed their tracking code from my site after only 21 days (21<30, in case anyone from IWebtrack is reading this).  In my mind, that was that.

Now, since I’ve already divulged a few personal details, I’ll let you in on another - I’m not the most meticulous when it comes to my credit card statements.  They show up in my mailbox, if the numbers don’t seem out of line I just pay them.  This has rarely caused me any issue.  Until I decided to stop using one of my cards a month ago after zeroing out the balance.  Much to my surprise, the card that hadn’t been used still showed a charge…from guess who?

Turns out that IWebtrack has been charging me all along.  I picked up the phone and called the company, trying every available extension and leaving a voice mail on each.  I wrote emails, just wanting an explanation and a refund.  That was three weeks ago.  What have I heard since then?  Nothing.  I had to go to my credit card company to dispute the charges, which is a pain in my ass and completely unnecessary if the folks at IWebtrack would just pick up the damn phone.

I won’t run down their product, it seems okay for what it is - similar to Visistat and some other products playing in that space (though Visistat’s interface is much slicker and user friendly for analytics newbies).

Just to prove my point, here’s the activity from our site…data collected from April 20th to May 11th…oddly, our site gets trafficked quite a bit, but IWebtracks own data shows NOTHING from May on.  I suppose if their code wasn’t on our site anymore, that’s exactly what would happen…

IWebtrack's own data shows nothing since May.

Avoid this company, even if you’re just interested in evaluating new products.  There are better products you can get for free.