Friday, January 23, 2009

Importance of Tracking and Testing Website Traffic Logs

Once your website is up and running now comes into picture the mathematic, the log analysis. That is analyzing traffic behavior and reading logs like unique visitors, repeat visitors etc. to evaluate effectiveness of individual pages amd specific advertisement campaign on one hand and of a website as a whole. It is is very important, yet widely neglected, aspect of internet marketing because it involves work. The split test that we carry out gives a clear picture of effectiveness of a particular advertisement, heading, headline etc. It involves simply pasting a small code or script in the source code of a web page or in the source or advertisement piece to be tracked.

Now a day, any quality web hosting company will provide all the desired traffic logs relating to visitors to your website in a hosting package. This needs to be checked at the time of hiring hosting service. Not all companies provide traffic data. An analysis of these logs disclosed every possible information about the visitor. The details show which part of world visitor came, which part of website was clicked and how long a visitor stayed on a specific page and at which point visitor left. This sort of data is very important for an internet marketer as it gives a chance to a marketer to make improvements. In short, such data informs everything about the effectiveness of a website or an advertisement based on which website can be improved or finetuned.

Believe me, this analysis will be of great help in improving performance of a specific page once you know visitor’s behavior. Depending upon the data analysis, you can change the headlines, sub-headline, graphic colors, links, or keywords and improve performance.

In brief, tracking and analyzing website traffic is important to the success of a website. All the established marketers and gurus invariably test and track their website effectiveness. It is the tracking and testing website traffic logs, that takes a marketer to the next level. It may seem a boring task in the beginning, but once you are used to it, you will find it very easy and there is no way out too.

Now a day different types of tracking software are available. In the beginning one may not feel inclined or just ignore due to budget involved. But it is to be kept in mind traffic data analyzing is a very important aspect of online marketing and ignoring testing and tracking can cost dearly Traffic in terms of lost sales. From the traffic logs you can very well find out which pages visitors are interested and spending their time and which pages they are leaving fast. Depending on the results, you can tweak your sales pages or other individual pages. Successful internet marketers spend lot of time on testing and tracking and never ignore this area.

When you find that majority of visitors are clicking particular keywords, keyword phrase or links, you get a clear and scientific picture of visitors behavior.

It is in fitness of things that if you carry serious online business, you pay specific attention in the area of tracking and testing of your website. Now a day state-of-the art scripts and software are available for carrying out analytical research. Just as keyword research tool, testing and tracking tool is also very important weapon to take online business to next level. You would certainly want to test and track results to keep the things under control. One very important piece of software that can do all the tracking you is AssocTrack you may want to check out.

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