Tracking Your Ads And How It Can Make You More Money
by Jason Ryan Isaksen

Note: Never use a hit counter that is visible on any of your web pages. Visible hit counters look amateur and you'll lose credibility if you have one. Instead ask you host to provide you with some sort of hit tracking through your log files. Most hosts will have a control panel you can log into to see how much traffic your website is getting and on what pages that traffic tends to go to. Plus if you simply want to know how many people visited the main page of your website, log files will show you that too.

Another Note: Never use pop-ups or pop-unders! These only irritate people and most internet surfers/shoppers have pop-up and pop-under blockers anyway.

On a different note, you'll be much more successful at marketing your website, products, and services, if you collect and analyze your website statistics. This is going to help you plan your future marketing strategies even better. Below are some of the things you should know:

1. Some sort of identity of the people who are viewing your website. At a minimum your log files will show you the domain name that each user is coming from.

2. You should know which of your web pages is visited the most often.

3. You should know the amount of times each of your web pages are visited

4. Your log files will also tell you how long each of your readers stays on each page.

5. Your log files will also tell you what website brought your visitors to your website.

6. You should also know which times of day your site gets the most visitors/traffic.

Again, if your Internet Service Provider is good, they will provide you with a special log/control panel that will show you all of the statistics outlined above and much more!

By studying some of these basic statistics you can find out what parts of your website are not doing their job correctly and fix them. For instance, your log files might show you that one of your products is not selling well. You might think it's just an unpopular or bad product to sell, until your log files show you that the link to that product is not even getting clicked on. And the cause of this could simply be that your page is designed in such a way that visitors just don't notice the link to that product. So the solution might just be to bring that link up higher on your site to make it more visible and obvious. But without this knowledge from your web logs, you may have made the wrong choice by eliminating that product instead of realizing that nobody was finding it.

But only your log files can tell you if that page is not getting visited often or if it is getting visited often and people just honestly don't want that product. After you make the change/fix to your site, you can then watch the traffic from the log files again to see if that correction made a difference. This is just one small example of how log files can be extremely useful. Your statistical log files are going to tell you all this and much more.

In case your Internet Service Provider doesn't offer very good statistics about your website, you can always purchase your own tracking software. The best one on the market is called "Web Trends." But web trends is for the more advanced marketer. If you're new to internet marketing I'd recommend you just pick a website host that does offer good tracking and statistical logging of your website traffic.

Below are the things a program like "Web Trends" can tell you:

1. What your most commonly visited pages were.

2. What keywords or phrases people are typing into the search engines to find your site.

1. How long your visitors stayed at each page of your site.

2. The pages where there were client errors so that you can fix those pages.

3. The most frequent exit pages. These are the pages your visitors were last on when they decided to leave your website. These pages must be boring if people tend to leave your website while reading them. So make them more exciting!

4. The total amount of unique new visitors to your site and how many of them are repeat visitors.

5. Which pages your visitors stay on and read the longest. These are your best so study what you did on those pages and do it again to the pages that aren't very popular or have high exit rates.

6. How many search engines visited your website or sent their spiders to rank your website. It's nice to know what the search engines are up to.

7. Which other websites are bringing you the most new visitors. Since you have ads out there, this will help tell you which ones are paying off the best. Or maybe even a website owner you don't even know has linked to your site just because he/she likes your site and this is bringing you major traffic. Now you can thank them and possibly do them a favor so they keep your link on their site. Maybe the two of you can even do a joint venture together. I've done this on two separate occasions and it brought me a nice chunk of cash.

8. If you offer downloads of software or anything else on your site, you can see which ones are being downloaded the most and the least often.

9. Statistics help you study the flow and movement of visitors throughout your whole site to make sure they come in where you want them to. Most importantly, you'll be able to make sure after they come in, they end up exactly where you want them like on your sales page or your educational, free information page. Lastly, you'll be able to make sure they exited on the page you expected them to exit on.

10. What operating systems and browsers your visitors are using.

11. What state and county your visitors are from. Geography can be important!

12. The statistical log files will let you know if you're getting "Page Not Found" errors so you'll be able to fix those pages that are broken or don't exist.

The Web Trends software can do all of these things listed above for you. But again, Web Trends is only for advanced students. Your website host should be able to provide you with some of the info listed above. Just ask your internet provider about accessing your web stats or logs. Don't go out and buy web trends until you consider yourself a highly advanced internet marketer.

Also, don't forget, you can do some of your tracking using companies such as HyperTracker.com and AdMinder.com. I also list a couple other tracking companies inside the members' only section.