What Do You Look For When Tracking Your Visitors?

Welcome to another informative article
by David Callan

Many online entrepreneurs are increasingly realizing that
tracking & analysing their traffic can make all the
difference for their business. In simple terms, trying to
market your business online without tracking your visitor
is like trying to drive a car in total darkness.

With the high number of tracking tools available online
these days, there is really no excuse for anybody failing
to track their visitors to find out where their traffic is
coming from and what visitors are doing on your website.

But even for those tracking their website traffic, the
question is how do they analyse their tracking data and
does the information really benefit them and their
marketing efforts?

Do you know how all your visitors found you?
Most site owners are delighted to receive traffic from a
new source. However, few will bother to find out
conclusively how their link ended up at the referring site
in the first place.

The whole question as to how your visitors found you is
so important that it is worth trying to gather as much
information as possible. The answer will be very
important in helping you do an even better job of getting
more traffic to your site.

For example if a webmaster decided to post one of your
free articles on their site, it is very useful to know why
they picked your article over the hundreds of other
possible articles about this topic. This little piece of
information alone can help you get a major breakthrough
in your marketing efforts.

Do you look for trends in your unique visitors?
What are the general trends at your site concerning
unique visitors? Is traffic heavy at particular times, days,
weeks or months? And if so, why? Actually, like most
research findings it should lead you to ask even more
questions and endeavour to answer them.

Many times, particular trends have helped businesses
develop new products as well as find valuable new
market niches for their existing products and services.
Even answers that may appear to be obvious need to be
verified.

Do you use your findings to constantly test your website?
Would you like to know the real secret behind those
highly successful online entrepreneurs? What sets them
apart from the rest who struggle all the way? It is
actually something so simple and so obvious that most
people miss it, even when it is staring them in the face.

The difference is that those really successful businesses
are constantly improving by introducing little changes all
the time that individually may make very little difference,
but put together helps the business grow in huge leaps
and bounds. You will be absolutely amazed at how
frequently leading marketers are testing new things
online. They will test anything, from using certain
headlines to colors and design. And a lot of these tests
emerge from analysing the tracking data of their website
traffic.

The information you generate from monitoring your
website traffic will only be useful if you put it to use by
constantly testing and improving your business on the
base of your data.

What content or articles are the most popular at your
site?
This seemingly obvious one is missed most of the time.
But why is it important to find your most popular content
on a regular basis? Content is at the heart of what your
site is. Visitors come to your site because of the content.
Popular content will tell you a lot of things about your
traffic. Including what interests your visitors the most.
This will go a long way in helping you to adjust the
content of your site so that you give your visitors more of
what they want.

In essence a successful site is one that constantly
evolves in response to customer needs and
requirements. So how do you do this when you are not
monitoring what your visitors like the most at your site?
How will you evolve without constant and regular
analysis of your tracking data?

Tracking data is at the heart of your success. Analyzing
and responding to traffic data from your site is at the
heart of successful web sites. It is a task that is critical
and very important. It is an opportunity that you cannot
care to miss out on and one with enormous rewards for
you and your site.


Article by David Callan. David is a search engine
consultant currently working with the
http://www.redsky.ie Web design Ireland team. Red Sky
are a leading provider of professional Web design and
development services in Ireland.