Tracking Your Website

How do I know if My Advertising is Working?

It is not an easy job to find the perfect analytic tools for your website. Website analytics help you identify the ads, campaigns, keywords, and referrals that contribute the most to your bottom line.

If you are not testing and tracking all your online advertising then every change you make, and every piece of advertising you pay for could be costing you money. When you run an advertising campaign, you run it with the intention of making money; but how do you know if it is really working? This is where website analytics comes in.

Web analytics is the collection, measurement, analysis and reporting of internet data for the principle reason of understanding and optimizing your advertising. Currently there are quite a few resources around the web to track your website, and it seems like it might be a complex task to find one that works and is understandable.

Imagine if you could accurately track every link on your website.

	How many visitors each campaign has brought in Ad tracking Sales today Unique clicks today Total unique clicks Referring page stats How many affiliates & subscribers each page generate Total sales that campaign created Cost per click analysis Cost per sale analysis Export reports for easy viewing/charting in other programs

The leading sources of web analytics are:

Google Analytics: (Recommended) Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Google Analytics makes it easy to improve your results online. Google Analytics is free to all advertisers, publishers, and site owners.
Urchin: Urching is one of the most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking, and analysis application, but it’s expensive.
Webtrends: Webtrends is a powerful, easy-to-use tracking tool measure the effectiveness of your Website performance, from pay-per-click & online marketing to search engine optimization. Real-time & presentation ready. This software is so easy to use, you do not need any experience what so ever.

Web analytics have life cycles; they involve the interaction of the prospective clients with various components of the website before making a purchase. As the potential client becomes familiar with the website, he/she will spend more time and browse through multiple pages with each returning visit. Your ultimate goal is to make your website saleable enough to have them convert to a customer, and ideally on the first visit.

Analytics are the first step in understanding what is going on with your marketing, how you’re getting people to the website, what’s working and what’s not, and where your visitors place most of their interest. Understanding this information allows you to identify strong and weak points in your marketing campaigns to save, and make you, money.

Web analytics provide you great insight into the sales cycle of your website as well which we’ll address in an upcoming newsletter.