Installing A Website Tracking System

The first thing you will have to do to start finding out what type of advertising works for you is to set up some kind of tracking system. If you aren’t tracking your visitors, then you can just forget about making intelligent marketing decisions. Also note that you need to be tracking more than just the overall traffic of your site. You need to know where people are going to on your site and you need each of your web pages tracked as well.

There are three simple ways to track your website stats:

Measuring Web Page Effectiveness With Free Counters

Superstats is the counter I use and recommend to you. The advantage of this method is that it is pretty simple to set up. You sign up for their service and then you insert their code into your site.

The disadvantage is that you will have a small link back to them on your site which may cost you a little traffic. An even bigger disadvantage is that you will need to sign up and insert a separate code on every one of your pages so that each page can be tracked separately. Having overall domain stats won’t do you that much good if you don’t know where they are coming from and who the buyers are.

v2.superstats.com/

Installing Cgi To Track Your Stats

There are over 70 CGI programs out there which will track your stats for you. Make sure that you choose a program that tracks your stats on each page of your site. You don’t want to have to use a separate CGI program for each page and you don’t want all of your pages put together.

The advantage of using a CGI program is that you won’t have to lose any traffic to outside sources and that some of the CGI programs can track all of your pages separately for you in one file. The disadvantage of this method is that it requires some programming knowledge and is often quite difficult to set up.

For a list of website counter programs, visit cgi.resourceindex.com/ .

Choosing A Hosting Service Where Stats Are Part Of The Deal

On my own current web hosts, stats for every single page of my sites are included. We talked about these particular hosting services in Chapter 11 but to refresh your memory, they are Third Sphere and Site Build It!

• Top pages are listed.
• Error messages that people receive are listed.
• Unique hits and page impressions for every single page are listed separately in these easy-to-use systems.

 

The essential advantage is that these are advanced tracking systems and simple to operate.

Keying All Your Promotional Activities

You need to key all of your ads separately. The easiest way to do this is to make a copy of your sales letter on your site and create another site out of it. If your sales letter is named sales.htm , you could also make a sales1.htm , sales2.htm , sales3.htm , and so on. Then, use a different page as your website address for each ad you put out.

If you really want to track your advertising results effectively, you will also want to make copies of your order form. Then, you can know which ad is actually producing the sales and exactly how much money is coming in from every penny you spend. There are some other methods you could use to key your ads. For example, you could also set up an affiliate programme on your site and allocate each one a different affiliate number for each ad you place. This would automatically track all the sales for you. You could use different auto-responders for the responses. If you are doing a major offline advertising campaign, you could even set up a complete duplicate domain that you don’t advertise any other way.

No matter which method you choose to use, the important thing is that you key and track every single one of your ads.