Guerilla Myspace Tracking

There are no Myspace trackers that are very good. Most of them work as follows:

You insert a code into your page title. This code actually displays a hidden image hosted on the tracker’s machine. The tracker grabs the IP address and tells you that someone visited your page at a certain time. It is up to the users to figure out which IP address is which Myspace user. If the person visiting your page didn’t email or leave a comment, there’s really no way of knowing who the visitor was. (Ideally, if they send an email at 3:21pm for example, and your tracker shows a hit at 3:21pm, you can then matchup that IP address to that visitor.)

Back in the day, there was a true Myspace tracker that gathered a lot of information, so you could tell every move a visitor made on your myspace page. Myspace eventually plugged those holes and the days of serious tracking are over.

But all is not lost.

Most of the time, you really only want to track someone in particular that you know or are interested in. The problem with these trackers is that you need to not only wait for that person to visit your site, but you have to figure out it was actually them who was visiting. If they don’t email or comment, you’ll never know.

Unless you try this.

The first thing we’re going to do is be a little more creative with the tracker. This hidden code doesn’t have to only be inserted into a Myspace page. It can be used anywhere. Like in an email.

Some email clients (such as Hotmail) allow you to edit the message in HTML code. It is here you can create a message, drop your tracking code in, then compose a message to whoever you want to track. Be sure to preview it and make sure the hidden code is not visible. Send them a joke or a hello email. When they open the email, your tracker will grab their IP address.

Now that you have their IP address, you can log in to your tracker website and match up the IP with their Myspace ID.

You might want to have two tracking accounts – one for uses like this, and the other to remain on your Myspace page. Having a separate tracker for IP “discovery” will keep your regular Myspace hits separate.

If you happen to have your own website that can generate hit reports, you can do the same thing, but with more flexibility. You could, for example create a “signature” graphic to go on the bottom of an email, but you might only use it one time. When cheking your reports, you’d see the IP of whoever viewed that graphic. Then you could plug that IP into your myspace tracker. You could create a custom background for your Myspace page, and track hits for that graphic.

This method has many more advantages, but the average user doesn’t have access to such reporting data. If you do, you should use this method instead of, or in addition to, a tracker.