If You’re Not Monitoring Traffic, You’re Falling Behind

Staying abreast of the growth of your blog or website online can be easier than you think, and it needn’t cost you anything. I’ve noticed that lately there has been a sharp rise in the number of companies offering free tracking so that you can keep an eye on what’s going on online.

But do be careful: there have been many calls for standards within the web tracking industry, and just because a company charges a great deal for their tracking software, doesn’t mean you’re going to get your money’s worth. It is definitely a case of Buyer Beware. What better way to find out which programs you should be using than seeing what professionals use?

The kind of tracking you’ll want to be doing for your blog or website depends on what you want to achieve. If you’re actively trying to sell something, then your tracking needs to be a great deal more precise than if you just want to increase your readership rates for example.

The basics of tracking are

· How much traffic?

· Where’s it coming from?

· What is it looking for?

· Was it satisfied on your pages?

· Can you identify trends that will allow you to increase a particular flow of traffic?

The more products or services you want to sell, the more complicated your tracking will become, particularly if you’re trying to attract a widely disparate demographic for each product.

I was going to create a separate list for the free and paid tracking applications, but some really good software is free, some not-so-good software is paid, and a lot of these applications offer a free and a paid version, so here goes:

A Rundown of What’s Out There

Google Analytics is a great free web tracking application. You just sign up and get the snippet of code to embed in your web page. You can even program goals for each page of your website with Google, and although there are paid programs with far more programmable options, this is a good start if you are totally new to tracking your stats. Just because it’s free, don’t underestimate Google Analytics: many professional search marketers use it (I admit often in conjunction with other programs). It’s basic, but it’s good and reliable. A common failing with many stats programs is that they go down, develop glitches and generally underperform so that you end up with huge holes in your stats records, which can be disastrous if you’re trying to make strategy decisions based on your stats.

IndexTools was recommended to me by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz, so it has to be good. This application is obviously capable of coping with the stats for a huge and extremely busy site like SEOmoz, so it would be more than fine for the rest of us.

FireClick Again, Rand was the source for this one, but he told me that there was a lot of positive buzz about it in the industry. Again, a good sign.

Mint is the program of choice for DoshDosh. She told me she has tried many different applications and always returns to this and Google Analytics.

Awstats is just one of the applications I use, because it comes with my hosting package. You can read all about its advantages and disadvantages on Wikipedia.

CrazyEgg has been around for a while. This application is one of a new generation of stats applications that will show you just where your visitor looked on the page with the aid of a ‘heat map.’ If you study the information carefully it will show you where on your web page you need to put your most important information and your click-thru mechanism. It can help you decide where to put ads and give you ideas for improving page layout. I’ve been using CrazyEgg since 2006.

GoingUp is another great application I’ve just discovered. It’s quite simple, but it’s also simple to use, which is good if you don’t have much experience. There’s a free and a paid version. I’ll let you know more about that once I’ve had a chance to try it out.

Another company, called OneStat, claims to have over 75,000 subscribers. An application with that many followers has to have something going for it, so it’s worth looking at.

Be aware that heat maps are the way to go for anyone who is serious about online success. Many of the biggest and most successful online companies, who incidentally are incredibly secretive about the tools they use for their success, make a point of utilizing heat maps to tweak their web pages for optimum effectiveness. This technology is quite possibly THE most significant advance in tracking technology. While CrazyEgg leads the field in heat map tracking software, ClickDensity is another one to consider, and their software does have some slightly different features.

This is by no means an exhaustive list: it’s meant to get you started, or perhaps to draw your attention to some programs you might not have heard of. I can do another piece about this if enough of you write in with information on the applications you use.

What to do With Your Results

Learning what your visitors are doing can be nothing short of a revelation. However, before you make any drastic changes to your website or blog, be sure that you’ve monitored enough visitors. A couple of thousand should do it. And when you do make changes, introduce them one at a time so that you can then monitor the results before you go on to the next change. ClickDensity in fact has a good article about making changes on your site according to your heat map findings.

Want to know what’s the single most important thing you can do to increase your conversion and grow your business? No, I’m not about to sell you on some insane program. This is vital stuff that you can and should be doing for low-cost or free.

Again and again search marketers tell their clients that they really, really need to track everything they do. Sadly a lot of the time this sage advice falls on deaf ears. If you’re new to the business the whys and wherefores of tracking everything you do online can be missed, to be sure.

But this subject is worth grappling with and I can’t think of a better example than Facebook, which is now worth a whopping $15 billion according to the (very reasonable) calculations of Danny Dover over at SEOmoz.org

Just for the sake of comparison, MySpace changed hands in 2005 for a mere $580 million, yet it has been around for much longer than Facebook, which is only five years old, and the MySpace user base was over 100 million as of 2006.

Now why should Facebook be worth so much more than any of the other social networking sites?

It’s all down to tracking. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has tracked everything his members do and stored that information.

So what?

Well just think for a moment how much more effective it would be if you wanted to place an ad on Facebook, and you could choose the age and gender of your target market. Not only that, but you could match your product to their interests (just to mention a few simple parameters of search). Just think how much you could increase your conversion rate by knowing these details and being able to target in this way.

Well, that’s the secret. That’s why advertising on Facebook is likely to be so much more effective than advertising on any of the other social marketing sites.

Now, almost certainly this information is going to have you rushing out to arrange for tracking of your site. Good idea. But before you do it take the time to shop around. If your web hosting doesn’t provide you with a range of comprehensive tracking tools (mine does: the button to HostGator is to your right over there), then go and sign up immediately with Google Analytics. Its free, you can track as many sites as you want, and you can even set some goals for yourself over there.

Stay tuned for a post on the best tracking tools out there in the next day or two.