What Do You Look For When Tracking Your Visitors?

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 Red Sky's Web design Ireland team. Red Sky are a leading provider of professional Web design and development services in Ireland.