Do You Hear Voices ...
Posted On: 2006-10-31
...when you look at your stats?
Now let me say right from the beginning, if you are new to this business then this article is certainly not for you where you are currently at. If you're new to this industry then the very last thing you need to be worrying about are your stats. For you the important thing is learning how to sell and once you have that right then you can come back and think about statistics.
However, if you have been around for a while and you're making money then you really should be thinking about your stats. Anyone in this business can make money if they can attract enough traffic simply by sheer weight of numbers but why only do half the job? Why not make the most out of every surfer you possibly can?
Why not start analyzing your traffic to see where the traffic that produces signups is coming from? Not only will that allow you to concentrate your efforts to attract traffic from the more productive sources but it will also save you time and money by helping you eliminate those sources that produce very little in the way of sales.
If you are in that situation wouldn't it be nice to be able to track data based on search engine terms or identify which search engine terms you used converted better than others?
It certainly sounds an interesting proposition to us because Steve and I always want to make our traffic work harder. But actually implementing something like that is way beyond our abilities as coders. Hell, let's face it ‘hello world' is beyond our capabilities as coders in just about anything but HTML so even though we knew we needed something like this we had no way of implementing it ourselves.
Then along came a post on SEOmoz where, not only did we learn the correct name for this, but we also learned that there are companies out there that will provide the service for you.
Action Tracking
Yep that is the correct name for what I am talking about and action tracking, just as its name implies, tracks the people who do certain things on your websites. You can add action tracking to any link you like ... even a ‘Click Here' link and you can then get a report on everyone who clicked on that link.
You can find out where they came from, what search term they used to find your site and, as I said earlier, you can track how many people used that term to move on via the link that the tracking is attached to.
If you're running an e-commerce site you can even get reports on how much money each term ultimately earned for you by showing which terms converted better than others. Then all you have to do is compare those figures with what you spent to obtain that traffic and you have a great metric to use to measure your business.
How Does It Work
For coding challenged people like Steve and me it really couldn't be easier to install if we use one of the commercial services. All it takes is the addition of a little piece of Javascript to the links you want to monitor and the job's done.
If you want to write your own scripts to monitor those links then perhaps some of the old Javascript outlink scripts might be a good place to start ... but don't quote me on that. As I said, I'll be paying a third party to run my action tracking for me so all I have to do is add that Javascript to the links.
And there are a number of analytic services that offer action tracking. Do a search on Google and you will find them and you will also see just how cheap action tracking can be. The prices that I've seen start at $49.95 so if you make just two more pay-per-signup sales because you use action tracking you will have recovered your cost.
And then there's the little matter of the money you save. If you buy traffic for your sites then you can monitor that traffic to see which traffic sources convert the best so you may very well make money by saving it.
So there's something for you to think about. Any form of traffic analysis enables your surfers to talk to you but if you really want to hear the voices and understand clearly what they're saying then action tracking is the way to go.