Hansel & Gretel Left a Breadcrumb Trail.....So do Your Website Guests! by Merle

Hansel & Gretel Left a Breadcrumb Trail.....So do Your Website Guests! by Merle

So, who's been visiting your website lately?
What do you mean you don't know? How can you tell
what's working if you don't have some sort of
tracking in place? Measuring website traffic,
also known as "stats," is how you know who's visiting your
site, where they're coming from, how long they
stay, entry and exit pages and more.

You need this information to make informed decisions
about your site. You can use it to understand your
guests' buying patterns and to measure the effectiveness
of your marketing and promotional strategies. It can
also be used to show you which
areas of your site are the most popular and the
pages no one seems to visit. You can use this information
to redesign your site and play-up the popular
pages while eliminating the ones no one views.

So how do you get this valuable information?
There are a number of ways to collect stats on your
website. You can:

1) Purchase Software
2) Use a Free Online Service
3) Use a Paid Online Service/ Third Party Auditors
4) Use your own Web Host

Let's take each option one by one. First in
the group of choices is buying stats software. The problem with
this option is the hefty price tag. Most of
the good ones don't come cheap.


Webtrends.com - http://www.webtrends.com

The leader in stats software, they offer
a variety of solutions for everyone from the small
business owner to large corporations. Prepare to shell
out some big bucks depending on your needs. Visit the
site and download a trial copy.

Websitereporter.com - http://www.websitereporter.com

Professional website stats software with many options.
Website Reporter 3.0 offers a free demo and runs on Unix
or NT and only costs between 50 to 75.00. Tracks total hits,
maximum hits and date, report traffic, top entry and exit
pages and much more.

Fast Stats - http://www.mach5.com/fast/

At only 99.00, this one is in everyone's price range.
Tells you who's visiting your site and does it
very quickly. Includes a hyperlinked tree view
report that graphically shows how visitors are
moving through your site. Runs only on Win 95,98,
or NT, but can analyze log files generated by
Unix servers.

Openwebscope.com - http://www.openwebscope.com

Free to download and 69.00 to register. Easy to read
charts and graphs tell you in an instant what visitors
are doing on your site. View sample reports at the site
to get a feel for what the software can do.

Now let's take a look at your options when it
comes to free stats. Many sites offer free
stats in exchange for placing a small banner or
button on your pages. Many of them are really good if you don't
mind the small graphic.

Freestats.com - http://www.freestats.com
Free Stats is free and easy to use. The downfall is the code
they give you inserts a banner on the pages you wish to track.
They do offer a "gold" service that eliminates the banners
for only 5.95 a month.

Thecounter.com - http://www.thecounter.com

The Counter supplies in-depth traffic reports. Tracks the
number of visitors, referrers, browsers, and more.
Simple to use add a few lines of HTML to your pages and
you're good to go.

Stattrack.com - http://www.stattrack.com

Stat Track is more then just a counter; you get detailed
information about your web guests. To use it you will
have to tolerate a small 88X31 button on your tracked
pages. Sign up, paste the code and you're done.

Now, let's move on to third
party or pay stats services. Third party means another
server collects and tabulates your website traffic, not
the server your site is hosted on.

Professional SuperStats-
http://v2.superstats.com/service_options.html

Offers advanced real time tracking and historical
reporting on site traffic. Not software, it's easy to
set up. The tracking code is invisible to your
site visitors, no banners or buttons. You can
also export the data to MS Word, Excel or PDF
format for further analyzing. Only 19.95 per month
or 200.00 US dollars for the year.

Bondsmith.com - http://www.bondsmith.com

Provides traffic measurements and third party auditing
services to website owners. Excellent for proving traffic
patterns to potential advertisers. Sign up and get your
first month for free.

Site Gauge - http://www.sitegauge.com/reports.htm

Offering a free service, but you have to show banners
on your site. For only 19.95 a month for up to
20,000 page views I'd go with the Pro service.
It's invisible on your site and the stats collected
are really in-depth. You can also request that the
stats be e-mailed to you daily.

The last and final option is your web host. Some
web hosts will be able to supply you with stats
but not all of them. You'll have to ask yours if they
do and if there is any charge involved. Usually they
supply you with this information for free as an add-on to
you hosting service, but I have seen some that charge
a small fee for access. Make a point to ask, as many
of them won't point it out to you otherwise.

There you have it, stats in a nut shell. By analyzing
your website statistics you'll be able to make more
informed decisions and know what's working and who's
visiting your site. The breadcrumbs are there....
do you have a system in place to find them?
About the Author
Merle's Cyber Promotions http://www.mcpromotions.com/
"Creating Visibility Online for Small Businesses"
Subscribe to MC Promotions Press mailto:subscribe@mcpromotions.com
New Service just added "Get Ready to Market Package"
For details go to http://www.mcpromotions.com/getreadytomarket.htm
To find out more about the products and services offered
by MC Promotions send mailto:mcservices-ar@automagical.net

Using Ad Tracking Tools by Pamela Heywood

Using Ad Tracking Tools by Pamela Heywood

You HAVE to know how well your ads are doing. You cannot just
cast thousands of them into the wind and HOPE that maybe you will
get the odd result. You must know where is good for your offer,
which ads pull best, etc. You need to test and test some more.

Indiscriminate free advertising will not generate sufficient
results for the amount of effort you'll put in. It will get some
results, but you'll be working hard, not smart.

In order to not have to post ads 48 hours a day for 2 clicks in
return, you must narrow it down by testing so that you can then
spend your precious time concentrating on what works best.

So how do you test?

There's lots of methods, but let me show you how to make use of
some of the simplest online tracking tools for your URLs.

The first one I have been testing myself is the free service from
LinkCounter.com http://www.linkcounter.com

Go there and set up a FREE account. You paste your "real" links
(the web addresses you want people to actually go to) into their
system and they give you a "new" link that you would publish in
your ads. How easy can it get?

You can set up as many as you like and keep adding to them, as
you wish. You only need one account to track multiple links, ads,
websites, offers, affiliate schemes, whatever.

Every day, they send you a report by email that tells you how
many clicks you got on each of the different links you set up.

Here's an example from my report:

Link Title: EACZ Bravenet Classifieds
Link URL: pub21.bravenet.com/classified/show.asp?usernum=
1800611284&cpv=1
Link : http://www.linkcounter.com/go.php?linkid=69653
Date: Clicks
2000-12-11 2

I gave it the title I wanted to see so that I could identify it.
The Link URL: is the real one (online classifieds) and Link:
is the one I publish, which is the one that 2 real live people
actually clicked on that day. (Impressive eh?)

I can see several benefits and uses for this:

=> If you have a very long URL, it saves it getting chopped in
half in a newsletter or any other email message as the original
one in this example obviously would.

If it gets chopped, it won't be "clickable", which means to work
someone would need to copy and paste it in bits into their
browser. Yeah! You think so?

No-one bothers, because that takes too much effort. In reality,
they will either click what comes in the first half ending up at
the wrong place -- usually the right place, but without your
reference on, or more likely, they will just skip it altogether.

=> linkcounter.com is generic -- it doesn't identify your program
so there is an element of "surprise" that will help you get the
click. People don't click if they think they've seen it before.

=> It's cheat-proof. It is still a URL with a number on the end,
but if anyone tries to take the numbers off this, they'll just
get an error or go to linkcounter. If they knock the numbers or
reference off your affiliate URL, then they may still end up at
the program, but you won't earn the commission.

=> You will find out if anyone actually IS clicking!

Track a whole ad campaign

If you use different linkcounter links, for the same URL, but
with different ads or for the same ads in different ezines, (give
each one or "campaign" a title that you'll remember), you'll find
out which ones work best so you know where to advertise again or
if you should maybe "tweak" your ads for better results.

You can also use this on your website, but you don't need to have
one to use it. You can also enter an amount, say if you are in a
program that pays you 10 cents per click and it will add them up
so you can double-check this against your commission check.

This doesn't mean you should NOT get your own website, domain and
home on the web. If you have that already, then you can use this
to see how many people are clicking away to certain links within
your site, both internal or external. Your log files should tell
you where people go internally, but if you don't have them,
here's an alternative. Your log files don't send you email each
day as this does!

You'll also find a similar concept at:
http://www.roibot.com/

Or you can do your own ad tracking. At the most simple, give each
campaign it's own page with a (preferably invisible) counter on.

If you do have access to log files on your site, "key" your URLs
with references of your choice so you can count the responses
to each. Or set up different redirect pages for each ad to see
which ones get hits. You can get the code for a redirect page,
here: http://www.tucats-design.com/eacz/code.html

Just don't leave it to chance, or you'll spend more time chasing
your own tail than actually making progress or PROFIT.


About the Author
Pamela Heywood is webmistress of http://www.tucats-design.com
- Building Your Online Business Instinctively. Subscribe to the
weekly TuCats Mewsletter (sic) mailto:subscribe@tucats-design.com
and get regular FREE hints, tips, articles and resources.