However, as a marketer, that isn’t the case. Marketers want targeted traffic and they want to know where it is coming from. Not knowing where your traffic is coming from means you don’t know which traffic generation methods are working.
The majority of marketers make no effort to track their traffic and are grateful for any visitors to their website.
If you are paying for advertising and not tracking your traffic you are throwing money away! You have to know which adverts are working and which are not. This way you can do more advertising that is earning you money and less of that which isn’t.
Tracking your traffic doesn’t need to be complex and can be done very easily. You can invest in scripts and services that will track your website traffic for you. These vary from the cheap to the expensive, the good and to the brilliant.
You don’t need to have a script or service to track your traffic, but it can often make it much easier for you.
A simple traffic tracking method is to use Google Analytics. This is a free to sign up service that many marketers are using. The good thing about it is that it offers in depth stats and can track almost anything. The downside of it that it offers in depth stats and can track almost anything!
The complexity of it is a good and a bad thing because you can find out so much about your website that it will initially confuse you. However, once you have spent some time analysing the results it will prove very useful.
Firstly you have to add the code to your website. This code is unique for each of your websites and needs to be inserted at the bottom of each page in your website just before the closing body tag.
Once it is reporting data, you need to drive a decent amount of visitors to your site to get some good results.
Analytics will report on all activity on your website and even go as far to overlay where people are clicking to help you understand the activity on your website. You can link your analytics account with your Adsense and Adwords accounts to further help you understand how well they are working for you.
One of the biggest benefits of Analytics is that it can provide goal tracking to track sales and sign ups to lists. It can be a bit tricky to get working behind scripts and membership sites, but is worth using.
The big appeal to most marketers is the fact that it has a lot of features, more than many scripts and is completely free. Of course, Google get to understand exactly what happens on your website, but that is a small trade off for such in depth analytics.
Using Google Analytics will give you a good understanding of where your traffic is coming from and what it is doing on your site. Through this you can improve your conversion rate, and in turn, your profits.
