Who's Visiting Your Website and Who's Buying Your Products?

The Number One Problem for Internet Marketers is Not Sales It's Knowing where sales and visitors came from! "I've placed 100 classifieds and no sales!" "I've place 200 classifieds and only got one sale!" Now, if you ask those marketers where that sale came from they don't have a clue. Here's how to solve this dilemma, increase your traffic to your website or blog AND increase your sales...!

What is Tracking

Tracking, when used in reference to internet sales and marketing, basically means to follow the steps of your prospective buyer from just before landing on your website to exiting your website or purchasing your product.. Obviously even lengthier records can be kept so over the years you know just whom to send that email about that new product you represent and get the best possible results.

Sounds Like a Pain. Why Should I Track My Hits and Sales?

For the same reason every big, successful business does! There's only 24 hours in a day and so much money that can be used out of the budget for advertising. So you'd better be able to find out what is working and what isn't as soon as possible. I spent years floating around the internet not tracking my sales. As soon as I did I discovered some advertising methods and places to market I simply didn't think were working. I also discovered marketing methods that were supposed to be working that were a big waste of time and money!

Where Do I Get The Information About My Hits and Sales?

You get them from a place called your cpanel in your website or blog. If you don't have a website and are depending on just affiliate links or even free websites to manage your business think twice on this. A website is just like office space. Fortunately you can get a basic website for around $5.00 a month now. You'll get several benefits available to you when you get your own website including better site statistics and greater linking ability to websites outside your domain.

Websites have a place called a cpanel. You log into it and you can find all kinds of information and tools. I use the raw stats along with a program I wrote. It gives me more information than the graphs the statistics programs usually show including tracking I use in emails. On one website I own the raw statistics are located via a link right on the front page of the cpanel. On another website I own I find my monthly raw stats by logging in to my web host supplier, clicking on Monthly Views, clicking on View Other Reports, then finding Raw Logs in there.

One website has me download the raw stats. Another website has me open them in a web browser. For that one I just click file and save.

Is There An Easy Way to Tell From Where My Visitors Came?

Yes there is. You can add a ? Then some type of alphanumerical characters after that.

For example:

MyWebPage?art (article) will work if your web page contains .htm or .html Sometimes if the ending is .com or .net or whatever you may need to place a / before the ?trackcode.

This won't work with pages that already have a ? in them as part of the web page address. In fact it could screw them up. So always test your pages just in case. If you're test is successful you'll end up on your web page with your tracking code at the end of your web page up in the address bar of your browser.

I promise you if you start doing that you're going to discover, just like I did, places where your web page is being spidered by search engines and getting a good search engine ranking that will surprise the heck out of you!

There Are Spies Amongst Us

Word of caution though, be sure not to make your code apparent as to what it means. When those strange places you discover place your web page on a search engine the tacking code ?trackcode will be with it. Also, don't, depend on your memory (wait, what was I saying?). Keep a text file of all your codes and what they mean. Check using your tracking software regularly.

Conclusion

Long before the internet, the mail order business was the buzz. Most big named retail outlets had a mail order business section as well as their brick and mortar outlets.

Often the return address and the sales letter, something reading much like our web pages today, along with the order form would have a strange series of alphanumeric characters. Sometimes they were refer to it as a department to help there company look even larger. Oddly enough, these codes found in the return address envelope, the sales letter and the order form were the same.

Why reinvent the wheel? When companies that were formed before you and I were even born already showed us how to be successful in our own ventures utilizing our resources to our greatest possible advantage - through tracking?right