Internet Marketing Quiddity

*** File under "Traffic Analysis" in your IM Index Mind Map - click for details.

If you've developed your internet marketing business far enough to create a website, one of your daily routines has to be to analyze your website traffic. Traffic is the lifeblood of an internet marketing business. Without knowing how much traffic you are getting, and where it is coming from, you're dead in the water.

The first step is to decide what tools you are going to use for analyzing your website traffic. And then you need to set up a regular routine for checking and analyzing that traffic.

Tools for analyzing website traffic

Cpanel - Awstats

The simplest tool of all is the Awstats facility that comes with your cPanel website hosting administration interface. If you search around on your cPanel page, you will most probably find either a direct link to Awstats, or something like "Web / Ftp Statistic" - which should itself lead you to Awstats. Click that and investigate the facilities available. You'll find things such as:

• How many hits, how many visits and and how many unique visitors your site received (per day, per month)
• What hours in the day were most popular
• IP addresses of visitors
• What Spiders and Bots visited you
• The lengths of time people stayed on your site
• What pages they visited
• Which sites they came from
• Which keywords were used if visitors came from a search engine
• ... and a great deal more

Google Analytics

This is another free tool - but it is much more comprehensive than Awstats - and you need to put some effort into setting it up.

Firstly, you'll need a Google Adwords account. Google created this tool primarily to help their Adwords users test their Adwords campaigns better, but you can use the tool freely without ever setting up an Adwords campaign.

With Google Analytics you can do everything that you can do with Awstats, and a great deal more - including setting "goals" for your site, and have Google Analytics measure the success of those goals under different circumstances, such as for different traffic sources.

To set up Google Analytics you also need to add some code to every page that you want Google to monitor. This can marginally slow down the loading of your pages, but is a very small price to pay for the huge amount of information you get. If this were a commercial tool being sold to the general public, I would expect to pay several hundred dollars for it.

But it's free from Google - no strings attached!

Click Tracking Tools

The third option is to install a click tracking tool, or subscribe to a commercial service. These tools provide a lot of functionality that you cannot get from tools such as Awstats or Google Analytics. This functionality includes:

• Link cloaking. This allows you to create URLs that you make public, but when the user clicks on the link, they get taken to a different URL. The most common use for this is when you are promoting an affiliate product. Instead of promoting a long and complex URL that you are given from your product vendor, you can use a short URL based on your domain name. For example, the click tracking tool I use is GoTryThis.  If you hover over that link, you'll see a nice, friendly, URL linked to to my IM-Index.com domain, instead of this long a ugly ULR that I would have had to use:
  https: //members.gotrythis.com/aff.php?aff=242
• Also, with link cloaking, you can change the URL that your link points to if you need to. For example, if the affiliate product you were promoting went off the market, you could easily substitute a different one just by change the destination URL. The fact that your cloaked link was widely publicised all over your sites, in your newsletter, on bookmarking sites etc. would not matter at all.
• You can arrange to alternate between different destination URLs: this can be very useful when testing different products or different pages within your site.

Regular Routine

Setting up your testing tools is not enough.

You need to make use of the data that the tools gather for you, and use that data to adjust your business operation in some way. Otherwise, all your time would have been wasted. But that's not quite as easy as it appears. Of all the information you get, what is important? And how do you know how to respond to it?

The answer is - you have to start with some planning and some goals. That topic is far too big to include in this article, but you should be able to see that it makes sense.

For example, if you want to make 2 sales per day, what does that mean in terms of visitors to your site, and conversion rate of visitors? If you're not making those sales, what is happening? Which traffic sources aren't giving you the traffic you want? Which are converting the best? How are your visitors behaving when they reach your site?

Decide what needs to happen for you to reach your goals, use the tools for analyzing website traffic to check what is happening, make some changes, and then use those tools again to check what changes as a result.

Based on your goals and what you need to check to see whether you are achieving them, write down your daily routine or checking your website traffic. That will ensure your time spent analyzing website traffic is used most effeciently and effectively.

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Technorati Tags: ad tracking, analyzing website traffic, awstats, click tracking, ForFB, Go Try This, google analytics, Traffic Analysis, website traffic analysis

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