How to Track your Website Visitors

Why you need to track your visitors

Suppose you post an ad online, say in an Ezine or a newsgroup.

Or you place your ad in an offline publication.

Or you use your signature file to make a contribution in a discussion group.

Wouldn't you like to know which of these methods pull the most visitors to your site ?

. . . so that you can concentrate on the most effective and eliminate the non-starters.

And wouldn't you like to experiment with different headlines, different sales copy, different visual effects on your web page until you come up with a winning combination ?

If you think that's the right approach to successful marketing then you are in good company: every leading marketer will agree that the secret is continual testing until they get the right result.

Which leaves the question: just how do you analyse where your visitors come from ?

The old solution

One way is to add a different tag (a question mark and a code) at the end of your Url. For example,

www.abc.com/ad.htm?001 for ad number one

www.abc.com/ad.htm?002 for ad number two, etc

Then you can inspect the logs at your website and those tags will be visible. The problem here though is that you have to download your log files, do the necessary formatting, search for and count each occurrence. And you need to repeat this laborious procedure whenever you need this information.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could see the stats instantly ?

Well read on . . .

The new way

There are now ad tracking systems which allow you to see instantly where your web sites hits are coming from.

If someone has just read your ad in an online newsletter and visited your site you'll know straight away.

If someone has just clicked to your site from an ad in your local paper . . . you'll know.

All you need to do is replace your usual Url with an ad tracking Url. Then simply visit the ad tracking system whenever you want to view your stats - completely up to date, to the second.

We can recommend and have used two such systems below.

The beauty of these system is the ease in setting up your replacement Urls and the scope for innovative testing of your ad response. For example you can switch between different pages that your visitor sees by simply changing Urls in the ad tracking system.

1) Roibot Ad Tracker

no need to install any software - it all runs from the Roibot site
you pay monthly
there is a free affiliate program where you get paid for introducing ROIbot to others each month that they continue to use it. This operates on a 2-tier level so that you get commission on sales made by those customers also
included in the price is a whole set of other useful tools and you can start with a month's trial at a cost of $1 (one dollar).

NB. If you would like to see how I used ROIbot to track readers of my newsletter click here

NOTE: In July 2003, Roibot was replaced by NitroStats. See footnote.

2) AdTrackZ

program needs to be installed at your site (fairly simple if you have technical knowledge otherwise there is an installation fee)
you pay a one-off cost
there is a free affiliate program where you get paid for introducing AdTrackZ to others - a one-off commission

Click here for AdTrackZ

Footnote: There is a complete guide to ad tracking programs
at Ad-Tracking.com