When your website is launched, the only way you will ever know if it is effective is if you have some way of analyzing it’s activity. This requires some form of website tracking. website tracking is an essential when it comes to the success of your website.
Discover what works
It is accepted that a successful website leads your prospective customer comfortably through your website. Without tracking, you will not know if you are doing this. Sure, you may get some conversions, but without knowing the statistics of people that arrive at your site, and then leave it without converting, you will not know your effectiveness.
Tracking also helps you locate the pages on your site that are poor performers. You can see pages that lose the customers (they leave the website) or pages that a customer views for only a few seconds before going to another page. This information allows you to make changes to your site to improve the visitor experience.
Types of Website Tracking
Basic
Server Side tracking of visitors logs activity on the web server and keeps track of how many times each file has been downloaded. This type of tracking is available on most web servers; however, it is highly inaccurate because it can’t distinguish between a search engine Spider (non-human website visitor) and a human visitor. It also does not accurately log all activity because of how the Internet works today. Large Internet providers like AOL or your DSL or Cable provider will cache website pages in order to make their network perform quicker. This means that if you (an AOL customer) request a page from XYZ.com and someone else (also an AOL customer) requested that same page 5 minutes ago, AOL will say “Hey, I already retrieved this page 5 minutes ago and it’s still in my memory, so I’ll just send it along to the new requester.” By doing this, they don’t actually get a fresh version off the web server for XYZ.com, and therefore there would be no entry in the log for the second request.
Moderate
Client Side tracking is a more accurate way of gathering information about your visitors. Because it runs on their computers, it can also provide you with a broader range of information such as the type of browser they are using (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc.) to how much time they spend on each page. Due to its nature Client Side tracking also solves the two problems that server side tracking has. It runs the tracking regardless of whether it is loading out of your Internet provider’s cache, and also doesn’t log the visits of search engine spiders. Pay-Per-Click tracking is another important feature of this type of tracking. It tracks which terms a visitor used to get to your website. You can then evaluate your campaigns effectiveness based on conversion rates for those terms. Conversions can be tracked in a basic manner with client side tracking by using a “thank you” page, which a visitor would only reach if they submit a contact form.
Advanced
The next level of tracking combines both Client Side and Server Side tracking. This keeps track of all of the things in the previous two types of tracking, but adds the ability to save information that customers submit to the website (contact forms, RFQ forms and more in it’s database) to its tracking tool. Imagine being able to track the path that visitors who are successfully converted take through your website. This would enable you to see what works, and work on improving the other areas of your website to work in similar ways.
Real Time Tracking
This is a fairly new technology that allows you to monitor on your desktop each and every visitor on your website and what page they are on, where they came from, and other information about that visitor. It even provides alerts when a visitor has been on a page for a specified amount of time you set, and allows you to initiate a chat with that visitor. By looking for signals that customers are close to conversion, the personal touch can close the deal. This type of tracking also includes the standard features of client side and server side tracking, but allows a real hands-on approach in the tracking and conversion of your website.
Ok, so it seems pretty cool, but what do I do with all this information that my tracking tools gather?
How do people find you?
This is perhaps one of the most important questions that you have regarding your website. Are you spending marketing dollars on PPC or advertisements? If so, then you want to know how those dollars are paying off. By tracking the source of your visitors you can evaluate winning and non-winning marketing campaigns, and adjust them in the future for higher success rates.
Where are your visitors from? This can be important for companies. One in particular that we assist is not interested in international visitors. Any efforts they see that are bringing in solely international visitors (marketing, PPC, advertisements) they want to be able to identify and eliminate. Since they can’t do business with these visitors, they don’t want to pay for their traffic.
Website tracking is the key component in your Internet strategy that allows you to evaluate how your website is performing and what areas you can improve upon.
Remember that what you cannot measure, you cannot improve! | 
