Many online businesses spend a great deal of money and time on traffic, but traffic by itself will get you nowhere. Tracking visitors to your website allows you to get right inside the minds of your customers, and see your site as they see it. Then you can make the changes necessary to make the most of your traffic.

How Does It Work?

Tracking software works by inserting a small piece of code into each part of your website that you want to be tracked. The code registers all visitors that come to that part of your website, and then the software will compile and analyze all the information for you. You can view the data as a set of reports that will give you invaluable information about the behavior of your visitors.

What Can It Do For Me?

The information you get from tracking reports allows you to see exactly how visitors are interacting with your site. You can check your bounce rate (how often people visit your site, look at one page and then leave), see how much traffic you get from any source, and track visitors from each individual source right through your site. Best of all, you can see which pages and sources convert into sales and profit for you, and which pages lead visitors away from your site.

Why Is It Right For Me?

Everyone with an online presence should be making use of tracking software. It’s cheap and easy, and the information you receive is well worth it in the long run. It’s easy to have intuitions and feelings about what would work well for your site and help you sell, but there is no substitute for cold hard data. Once you know what is working for you and what isn’t, you can take the steps to maximise the profitability of your website.

How Can It Make Me Money?

Let’s take a simple example. If you’re running two PPC campaigns for your site, with no tracking, you have no idea which campaign is making you money. You know how many people clicked on your ad, but you don’t know how many of those people went on to buy your product or give you their details. One of the campaigns may actually be losing you money. With effective and up to date tracking software, you can analyze exactly how many of your visitors bought your product from each campaign. It should be easy to see how you can make a lot more money if you’re using the right tracking solution.
Bricks and mortar businesses would kill for the chance to analyze the behavior of their customers in this detail. Every time you see an offline advert that contains a coupon or code for a special deal, that means a business that’s prepared to sacrifice some of their profits just to find out how well the advert is converting to sales. As an online businessperson, you have the opportunity to get all of this information for virtually nothing. If you don’t take that opportunity, you will be missing out.

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By Scott Dantema/www.GatewayInternet Marketing.com

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Tags: Bounce, Campaigns, Feelings, Help You Sell, How Many People, Information Behavior, Information Tracking, Intuitions, Lead, Money, Online Businesses, Ppc, Presence, Profitability, Running, Software Works, Track Visitors, Tracking Software, Traffic

This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 1:23 pm and is filed under Website Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.