Recommended Web Marketing Tools
Web Traffic Tracking & Analysis
Tracking your web traffic should entail more than just looking at
how many hits you've gotten. In fact, "hits" can be misleading and
are not a good basis for judging how well your site is doing.
How many hits do you think we've generated by your visit to this
page? It's more than just one, in fact it's probably more like half
a dozen or more. If we relied on counting hits to determine how popular
our site is, we'd get a very skewed picture.
More important numbers are unique visitors and page views. These
are especially important when you're trying to determine your Return
on Investment (ROI) and set budgets for web marketing.
A simple-to-use application for tracking these important numbers
is HitsLink - it's economical and provides hundreds of reports to
help you figure out how much any single visitor to your site is worth
in dollars and cents. It also allows you to see where your visitors
are coming from - both from search engines and from other sites that
link to yours.
We use Hitslink for many of our clients. When beginning an Internet
marketing campaign, especially for ecommerce sites, we set up a HitsLink
or similar tracking system right away to get a baseline that shows
how many visitors they've been getting and where they've been coming
from.
We combine this information with sales figures in order to calculate
how much an average visitor is worth. Here's a very pared-down example:
Sample Company Baseline Reporting
Number of unique visitors last month: 10,000
Amount of sales last month: $5,000
Net profit on sales: 80%
Average
sale per customer: $0.40
This is a really simplistic example, but if this were the only data
we were considering, we could infer that any visitor that we bring
to the site for less than $0.40 is likely to be profitable.
Armed with this information, we could determine budgets for Google
AdWords, Overture Pay Per Clicks and other web marketing campaigns.
The results would be easy to measure, and ongoing monitoring would
enable us to tweak our campaign bids in order to maximize profits.
WebTrends also
offers excellent traffic analysis tools. We usually
determine what tool to use for a given client by analyzing traffic
patterns and determining what reports are required. Sometimes HitsLink is more economical; other times, WebTrends offers the better value
based on the client's needs. We always employ third-party tools
in order to give our clients unbiased
reports on
the success of our efforts.
Please note that we are a HitsLink affiliate.
This means that we earn a commission if someone clicks through from
our site and signs
up - but we do not control results, they are completely unbiased.
And we always base our decision on which tool to recommend based
on what will provide the required reports for the best price for
our client.
HitsLink.com
Get advanced site traffic analysis, including
hundreds of statistics on visitors and
their behavior.
more...
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